


Recoil

by Shadowscast



Series: Enough Time [1]
Category: Once a Thief (TV)
Genre: Asexual Li Ann, Asexuality, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mac Has Nightmares, Nightmares, Post-Series, Pre-Slash, a little action and a lot of talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 10:45:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18030248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowscast/pseuds/Shadowscast
Summary: Mac, Vic and Li Ann survive Michael's betrayal in the series finale, but Mac has a concussion and can't be alone for the next week.  The three agents retreat to Li Ann's apartment to recuperate and take care of each other.    Forced into constant proximity, it's a lot harder to keep secrets that they may not feel ready to tell.  Meanwhile, someone may still want them dead....





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the dialog and described action at the start of Chapter 1 is lifted directly from the _Once A Thief_ series finale, _Endgame_.

Michael was still alive when his car exploded.

It was his own panic that killed him. Li Ann had been shooting to kill, sure, but she knew she'd missed—the car's windows were still intact when Michael swerved and lost control.

Now Li Ann stood numbly and watched the wild orange flames and billowing black smoke for the length of one, two, three wild heartbeats. Michael was dead. This time, there could be no doubt.

And Mac?

What had Michael done to him?

Li Ann smacked the safety catch back on her gun and sprinted towards the abandoned mill. If the Director's suspicions were correct—if Pucci had brought explosives—there was no telling how much time they had left.

She came upon Mac and Vic just in time to hear Mac warning Vic about the bomb, telling him to get out. Mac was sprawled on the floor, obviously hurt, and Vic was trying to haul him to his feet.

"Like I'm suddenly going to start listening to you?" Vic grunted, levering Mac's arm over his own shoulder.

Li Ann felt a moment of desperate, intense love for Vic. Of course he wouldn't run away and save himself. It would be unthinkable.

Neither would she, obviously. She grabbed Mac's other arm. "How much time do we have?" she said, in lieu of _hello_.

Mac seemed groggy, but he answered her question. "Uh, by my watch, like none." Not that he was looking at a watch.

Li Ann had thought her adrenaline was already at peak—but nope, it spiked again. She pulled harder on Mac, trying to get her centre of gravity under his left shoulder. 

"Get up! Get up!" Vic was yelling, frantically doing the same on Mac's other side. Mac sort of tilted upwards and finally miraculously found his feet. "Run!!!" Vic practically screamed.

They ran.

* * *

They'd barely made it clear of the building when the first flash of light and heat reached them. Li Ann's awareness of the explosion was so sharp, so clear, she could have sworn that she actually perceived the gap between the flash and the boom.

"Down!" Vic was yelling, and Li Ann instinctively pushed Mac down ahead of her, saw Vic simultaneously doing the same thing. She hit the ground and covered her eyes, almost but not quite before the second explosion, the big one, smacked all three of them with a giant's hand of a shock wave.

More explosions. Shattering glass, a pattering rain of debris. A roar of fire, growing, and the stink of gunpowder and oily smoke. Li Ann's ears were ringing, but not so much that she couldn't hear Vic say "Everyone okay?"

Li Ann took an experimental breath—she'd hit the ground hard and skidded, but everything felt intact. "I'm good," she said. "You?"

"That was too fucking close," Vic said. He was already on his knees, climbing to his feet. "Pucci does not mess around, apparently. May he rest in pieces." Vic checked his gun and scanned their surroundings. "Where's Michael?" 

"Dead," Li Ann said.

Vic's tension eased fractionally. "You sure?"

"Very." When she blinked, she could still see that first explosion, the blackened skeleton of Michael's car. When she lifted her hand to brush her hair away from her eyes, she could smell the blowback on her fingers. "I killed him."

Vic gave her a quick, concerned look, but Li Ann turned her attention to Mac. He'd come to a sitting position and was cradling his head in his hands. He didn't have any visible wounds, other than a few scrapes from falling on rough ground and getting pelted by debris. "Mac?" she said, touching his hand. "What happened?"

Mac didn't answer right away, but Vic interjected, "I found him unconscious, pinned under a collapsed light fixture."

"Michael happened," Mac said then, blinking up at them.

"Do you think you can walk?" Vic said. "Come on, we should get farther away from the building, it could collapse at any moment. And we'd better get to the Director—she was already shot, and she might be hurt worse if she got hit by the explosion."

Mac let Vic and Li Ann help him to his feet. "Where's Michael?" he asked, a little frantically. "He tried to kill me."

"Uh, we just covered that, man," Vic said, giving Mac a weird look. "Michael's dead."

Mac blinked. "Are you sure?"

"His car crashed and exploded right in front of me," Li Ann said emphatically. "Believe me, I'm sure this time." She expected it to hurt, but somehow it didn't.

In those last moments, when she'd seen that he wasn't going to turn away this time and she'd realized she needed to shoot him, she'd felt nothing but a faint regret.

Maybe she'd already had her fill of mourning him the first time she'd thought he was dead.

"Pucci's dead, Michael's dead," Vic said, making a quick gesture of counting them off. "Do you think there are any more shooters we need to worry about?"

"Not that we've seen tonight," Li Ann said. "But Paul's still out there somewhere."

"Paul?" Vic repeated.

Li Ann realized that Vic might not have met Paul. "Michael's bodyguard," she clarified.

"His new brother," Mac added, and then in more of an undertone, "My replacement." Then his eyes widened and he glanced around with a bit of a panicky look, simultaneously pulling his gun. "Shit, where's Michael?" he said. "He tried to kill me."

"Um, didn't we just..." Vic started.

"Head injury," Li Ann said, suddenly understanding.

"Uh oh," Vic said. "Okay, Mac, let's get you out of here." He tapped Mac on the elbow to get him moving.

Li Ann spared a glance for Mac's gun and saw that the safety was engaged, so she didn't try to take it from him. The chances that he'd need it in the next few minutes still seemed uncomfortably high. She pulled her own out of its holster as they rounded the corner of the building.

The Director was still where Vic and Li Ann had left her, leaning against the car. She was watching the flames with a devastated expression. Sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder.

 _She thinks we didn't make it out,_ Li Ann had time to think before the Director turned her head and caught sight of them. 

A raw expression of grateful joy spread across the Director's face. Seeing it, Li Ann realized that she would never again assume that the Director saw her agents as disposable pawns.

* * *

The first emergency vehicle on the scene was an ambulance. The crew whisked the Director away, but left blankets for Mac, Li Ann and Vic to huddle in. Vic took a good look at Mac, and then wrapped his own blanket around Mac's shoulders as a second layer. This didn't stop Mac's teeth from chattering.

"I'm going to take one more look around before the firetrucks get here," Vic said.

"Do you want help?" Li Ann offered.

"No, I think you'd better stay with him." Vic gave Mac a worried look. "Make sure he gets in the next ambulance."

Vic ran off, and Li Ann turned to Mac. He was sitting on a hunk of concrete. They'd moved away from the building, out towards the road. The warmth of the burning mill was barely noticeable from here, though the flames provided a flickering light for the scene.

Mac had asked about Michael twice more. Each time Li Ann repeated that she'd killed him, Mac accepted her answer. He was confused, but he knew he was confused.

"Mac, let me see your head," Li Ann said now. Not that there was much she could do before the next set of paramedics arrived; if he'd been bleeding very much, they would have noticed by now.

He held still, and she carefully looked him over. There was a dark, matted place in his hair at the very top of his head, barely noticeable in the poor light. She avoided touching it. "What exactly did Michael do?" she asked him, mostly just to get him talking.

"Sucker-punched me," Mac said, touching his chest. "Shot the light fixture down on top of me. I was supposed to die." He blinked up at her. "You and Vic. Saved me."

"You would've done the same for us," she said. The words came automatically, but she knew they were true.

"Still," Mac said. "Thanks."

Just then Li Ann heard the crunch of tires approaching—and no siren. She stepped away from Mac and drew her gun. Mac started to stand but then fell back down, groaning and clutching his head.

The car came in sight, already slowing down. Li Ann kept her gun trained on it until the driver's side door opened and Dobrinsky stepped out.

She had never been so glad to see that man.

* * *

Once Dobrinsky was on the scene, things moved quickly. He took charge of the delicate balancing act between ensuring appropriate access for emergency vehicles and covering up the Agency's mess.

Li Ann rode to the hospital in the same ambulance as Mac, and they were half-way there before she realized that in addition to looking after Mac, the paramedics were treating her for shock.

She felt a little amused and disconnected at the realization. Shock is a thing that happens to normal people, not to Shadowy Government Agents.

But then as long as she was in the hands of the regular health care system, she was Li Ann Wong of the RCMP, so she supposed a little shock was good for her cover.

And she kept seeing fireballs when she closed her eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

Vic was in the process of dozing off, leaning against Li Ann's shoulder, when he was woken by brisk footsteps approaching. He straightened his spine and tried to blink away the fog, bracing himself to resist another nurse trying to tell him and Li Ann that they might as well go home.

It was Dobrinsky. He looked haggard, at least relative to his usual self. His collar was undone to the second button, and there were smudges of soot on his white shirt. "Hey sport," he greeted Vic. "How are you holding up?"

Vic rubbed at the crick in his neck, trying not to disturb Li Ann too much—Dobrinsky's arrival didn't seem to have woken her. "I'm officially fine," he said. "Li Ann too. Do you have any news about Mac or the Director?"

Dobrinsky nodded. "Seems like they got lucky—relatively speaking. The Director's through surgery, and they're expecting to release her in the morning. The doctor's ready to let Mac go now, as long as he has someone to go home with."

Vic thought that one through, blearily at first and then suddenly coming to a sharp awareness—obviously Mac didn't have anyone to go home with. Except for Vic and/or Li Ann.

"Yeah, okay," he said before he could talk himself out of it. "Not a problem. I'll look after him."

Dobrinsky gave Vic a searching look. "Last time you two shacked up together, it took about eighteen hours for the situation to degrade to the point of fistfights and guns drawn."

Vic cleared his throat a bit uncomfortably. Yeah. That had not been their finest hour. "To be fair, we were actually working together to _pretend_ to want to kill each other so that we could sucker you into letting us go. Um. Sort of."

Dobrinsky's gaze stayed skeptical. "I could call in the Cleaners," he offered. "They don't mind working nights."

"Jesus, look, a few hours ago I ran into a building that was about to blow sky high just to drag his sorry ass out of it. I'm up for this." Feeling the need for back-up, Vic nudged Li Ann awake.

She groaned a little. "What time is it?"

"Just past 3 a.m.," Dobrinsky answered. "Good to see you're all right, Tsei."

She nodded. "What about Mac? And the Director?"

Dobrinsky quickly repeated what he's just told Vic, leaving out the offer of the Cleaners.

"Well obviously I can go with him," Li Ann said, already easing forward in her seat.

"Whoah," Vic said quickly. "Are you sure you're up for it?" He knew she had an all-clear, medically, but he had to assume that killing Michael (again) had had an impact on her.

Come to think of it, this really wasn't a night for her to be alone, either.

Li Ann was frowning at him, but her thoughts seemed to be running along a different track than his. "He's my _brother_ ," she said. "Vic, if you're backsliding into that old rivalry again—"

"What?" Vic interrupted. "No!" Although, even as the denial passed his lips, he had a flicker of doubt—like maybe she was right. The idea of Li Ann and Mac spending the night alone together _did_ still give him a little jealous pang.

Okay, even if intellectually he knew that Li Ann had firmly rejected both himself and Mac as romantic partners, old emotional habits died hard.

But that wasn't the important point right now. What was important was—"Actually I think we should both go with him." He hadn't thought of it until he said it, but it was clearly the best solution. Mac and Li Ann would both need support tonight, and neither one would necessarily be fully capable of giving it to the other.

Li Ann's expression softened. "Sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you. It's been a rough night."

"No kidding," Dobrinsky interjected. "So if that's all sorted out, you can go collect Mac. Just wait for the doctor to come and give you instructions before you head out."

* * *

Mac was in a ward, a big room with about half the beds occupied. Most of the other patients seemed to be sleeping, but Mac was sitting up. He was still wearing his clothes from earlier that night—minus his coat and shoes, which Li Ann had taken charge of when he'd been admitted.

"Guys!" he said with obvious relief when he saw them. "You're okay!"

"Yeah, uh—you knew that already," Vic said, coming up to the bed.

Mac shrugged. "The whole night's kind of hazy. I've got a splitting headache. Like, almost literally. But apparently there's not too much bleeding so they decided not to cut me open."

"Cut you open—you mean your skull?" Vic winced. "Yikes."

Li Ann, on the other side of the bed, took Mac's hand and squeezed it. "The Director's okay too," she let him know, "but she has to stay overnight. Dobrinsky said we can take you home as soon as we've talked to your doctor."

The doctor arrived then, a slender dark-skinned man who looked even younger than Mac and Li Ann. Vic suppressed his urge to demand to see a copy of the man's medical licence. _You're getting old, Mansfield,_ he ruefully reflected to himself.

"I'm Dr. Bakshi," the doctor introduced himself, offering Li Ann and Vic each a handshake. "Mr. Dobrinsky told me that you two will be staying with Mac until he's ready to be on his own." He turned to Mac. "Mac, do you give me permission to share the details of your medical situation with your friends?"

Mac nodded. "Sure, sure. Share away, doc."

The doctor turned to Vic and Li Ann. "Mac has a concussion. The initial CT scan showed a very mild subdural hematoma. That means he's had a tiny bit of bleeding inside his head, under the skull but outside the brain. That sort of bleeding can be very dangerous if it progresses, but over the past six hours Mac's symptoms have been subsiding, and the second scan didn't show any additional bleeding, so it looks as though it'll be safe to let the injury heal on its own without surgery."

To Vic, that sounded pretty serious. "Are you sure it's okay for him to go home?" he asked.

Dr. Bakshi gave a sort of head-tilt, which wasn't quite a nod or a shake. "Somebody will absolutely need to stay with him all the time for the first forty-eight hours, but yes, in the vast majority of cases this sort of injury heals on its own. Complete rest is very important for the first few days. Definitely no vigorous physical activity—ideally he should spend most of the time lying down, but a bit of sitting is okay if he feels up for it, and he can do short walks around the house. And—here's the bit that most patients find particularly hard—" he shot an apologetic glance at Mac, "you have to rest your brain, too. No reading, no TV, no paperwork. Concussion recovery is pretty boring, I'm afraid."

It occurred to Vic that this was a perfect opportunity for a snarky joke about how resting his brain shouldn't be hard for Mac—more like status quo. But he decided that he didn't want to give the doctor the impression that he was an asshole.

Besides, after this evening's events, Vic's urge to snark at Mac was at a pretty low ebb.

Mac had never trusted Michael. The rest of them should have given Mac's instincts a lot more credit.

"No alcohol until your family doctor gives you the all-clear," the doctor was continuing with the list of things Mac couldn't do. "No work, obviously, for at least a week. I've written you a note for your employer. I'm going to give it to your friend." He handed a slip of paper over to Li Ann.

"For the first 48 hours, you'll really need to stay with him constantly. He should sleep as much as he can, but someone will need to wake him every two hours to make sure that he's still clear-headed.

"He can expect the headaches to continue for a few days, and probably some dizziness as well. Don't be surprised if he has some difficulties with short-term memory. Generally speaking, though, you should see the symptoms improving fairly steadily. At the end of the week, he should see his family doctor, who will let him know if it's safe to return to normal activities. Many patients do recover completely in the space of a week, particularly if they follow all of the instructions about rest. But in some cases recovery can take a lot longer, so try to be prepared for that possibility.

"In a small percent of cases, the brain bleeding or swelling can start up again even several days after the injury. If at some point Mac's symptoms seem to be getting worse instead of better, bring him back to the ER. And in particular, if he suddenly starts showing extreme dizziness, slurred speech, or if he has a seizure, call an ambulance right away."

It occurred to Vic that when he'd volunteered to look after Mac, he'd taken on a serious responsibility. There wasn't an option to walk out if Mac started pissing him off—which he would, oh God he definitely would. Mac cooped up in his apartment for a week, not even allowed to watch TV? Shit. This was gonna be rough.

He shared a glance with Li Ann, wondering if she was thinking the same thing. Last time _she'd_ shared an apartment with Mac for a few days, she'd gone off the idea of cohabiting altogether. She'd hated it so much, she'd broken off her engagement with _Vic_.

Briefly, Vic let himself entertain the possibility of bailing on this whole deal. He assumed Dobrinsky's offer of sending in the Cleaners hadn't been a joke. Those guys were calm, cool professionals. Whatever irritating shit Mac pulled in the throes of continual pain and excruciating boredom, the Cleaners would let it slide off them like they were Teflon.

And if sending in the Cleaners seemed a little cold—well, objectively, their relationship to Mac was the same as Vic's own. They were co-workers, not really friends. Not family.

And hadn't Vic already done enough for Mac, tonight?

Okay, nope. Failed thought experiment. Vic was blushing just from the shame of thinking about it. Sure, they weren't family or even friends in the traditional sense, but next to Li Ann, Vic had to admit that he was the closest thing to either that Mac had.

Anyway, the doctor had already headed off to the nurse's station to register Mac's discharge in the system, and Li Ann was holding a wheelchair while an orderly helped Mac into it.

Okay. They would get through this somehow.

* * *

It wasn't until they were in the front lobby of the hospital, waiting for their cab to show up, that it occurred to Vic to wonder where they were going.

"Hey guys," he said. "Whose apartment are we gonna do this at?"

Li Ann blinked. "I'd assumed Mac's place."

"Sure, except then we're sleeping on his couches, and one of them's really short," Vic said, thinking back again to the time he and Dobrinsky had been locked in at Mac's during the Nicholas Love case.

"Good point," Li Ann admitted. "How about mine, then? I've got the futon."

Vic nodded. "That'll have to do." Vic only had one couch himself, and it wasn't a pull-out.

At that point their cab arrived. Li Ann wheeled Mac up to the front passenger-side door, and then Vic moved in to offer Mac a hand getting into the car.

"I'm not paralyzed," Mac muttered, but he nevertheless accepted a forearm clasp to steady him as he made the transfer. Inside the cab he leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, grimacing. He didn't make a move towards the seat-belt.

Out of the corner of his eye, Vic noticed that Li Ann had headed off to return the wheelchair. "I'm just gonna belt you in," Vic said. He waited a couple of seconds to give Mac the chance to tell him to fuck off, he could do it himself—but nope, no response from Mac. So Vic leaned in a bit awkwardly, tugged the belt across Mac's torso, and fumbled for the clip. After about three hundred percent more lap-touching than he would've preferred to give his male co-worker, Vic managed to get the belt secured.

"Thanks," Mac grunted as Vic backed out of his space.

"No problem man," Vic gruffed in return.

Jesus this was not Vic's comfort zone.

Happily, Li Ann returned at that point. She and Vic climbed in the back, and she gave her address to the driver.

"And hey, keep it as smooth as you can," Vic added to the driver as they bumped over a speed-bump pulling out of the hospital's driveway. "Our friend here just had a concussion."

The driver nodded, and made a noticeably slow and careful turn out onto the main street. "No problem, smooth as silk from here on out," he promised.

"Thanks," Li Ann whispered to Vic.

"No problem," he whispered back.

"I mean, thanks for coming along." She gave his hand a squeeze, though she let go again immediately afterwards. "I know that you and Mac have a rocky relationship. This is above and beyond the call of duty."

Since he'd just had this talk with himself, he knew what to say. "It's not duty, Li Ann. It's ... it's the Three Musketeers, right? If we're not here for each other, who else is gonna be?"

She took a slightly shuddery breath and squeezed his hand again. "I'm really happy to hear you say that."

"It's gonna be okay," Vic promised.

* * *

When they arrived in Li Ann's apartment, Vic abruptly realized that there were still some logistics to work out.

There were three of them, and two places to sleep.

Also, Vic and Mac were here with no spare clothes or toiletries, and their clothes were all filthy with dirt, smoke, and blood.

"What now?" he said to Li Ann.

She had obviously been making the same calculations, but she shrugged. "We'd better get Mac in bed first. Then we'll figure out the rest of it."

Mac had been leaning on Vic's shoulder the whole way up to the apartment, so Vic continued supporting him as Li Ann led the way to her bedroom. None of them had taken their boots off; they were leaving slushy footprints across Li Ann's floor.

"Here," she said, pulling back her duvet. "Help him sit down and get his shoes off. He'll have to keep those clothes on for now; I don't have anything that would fit him."

"I could go back to his place and get some," Vic volunteered, kneeling on the floor in front of Mac and tugging at his shoelaces. "I can take your car if you give me the keys. I'll need to get stuff for myself, too."

"It can wait till you've had some rest," Li Ann said. "At this point my sheets are already dirty." In fact, little bits of grit and concrete that had been stuck to Mac's clothes since the explosion were already visibly littering Li Ann's fine cotton sheets. Oh well.

"Okay Mac, ready for legs up?" Vic asked.

"Jesus, yes," Mac said, closing his eyes with a groan.

Li Ann tucked an arm under Mac's shoulder to help him lie down gently, while Vic grabbed his ankles and helped him swing his legs up onto the bed. Not like Mac was a dead weight in this process, and in fact he probably could have handled it on his own—but Vic personally had been pretty freaked out at the doctor's warnings about what might happen if Mac didn't take it easy enough, and he assumed Li Ann was feeling the same way. She gave Mac an exceptionally tender, worried look as she pulled the blankets up over him.

"How are you feeling?" she asked him.

"Head's pounding," he muttered. "Hard to think about anything else."

"Okay, you try to rest," she said. "Vic and I will be right here if you need anything."

Back out in Li Ann's living room, Vic helped her unfold the futon, which normally served as her couch.

"There are extra sheets, blankets and pillows in my bedroom closet," she mentioned, gazing a little doubtfully at the futon. "I guess I'd better set it up."

Vic wondered if he needed to bring up explicitly the fact that the two of them hadn't slept together in the same bed since Li Ann had broken up their engagement six months ago. Obviously they were both _thinking_ about it right now.

"You're going to be stuck sleeping in those clothes, too," Li Ann added absently.

"Um," Vic said, thinking it through. "Somebody's going to have to wake Mac up in two hours. That'll be about—" he checked his digital watch, "six a.m.. And then again two hours later." His brain was feeling pretty foggy, but he thought he saw a logical plan here. "How about I do the six a.m. wake-up, and I'll just nap on the bed with Mac until then. That way I won't get the sheets on the futon dirty. You can change into clean pyjamas, sleep on the futon until eight. After the six a.m. wakeup I'll go round to my place and Mac's and pick up the stuff that we'll need. Just give me your car keys before you go to sleep."

Li Ann accepted this plan, clearly too tired and wrung out to come up with any alternatives. Vic helped her get the fitted sheet on the futon mattress, and then left her to do her own bedtime routine while he set his watch alarm for 6 a.m. and then crawled into the bed beside Mac.

And then he was in bed with Mac.

Oh, hell.

It had sounded a lot less weird when he'd described it to Li Ann. _I'll just nap on the bed with Mac,_ right. He'd vaguely pictured himself on top of the covers—but he didn't want to get Li Ann's duvet covered in the grime from his clothes. And he sure as hell didn't want to take _off_ his clothes.

Well, Mac was asleep, and unlikely to remember any of this. And Vic was exhausted.

_No better options,_ he reminded himself, and closed his eyes.

It felt like 30 seconds later that his watch alarm started beeping, but his grogginess told him that he'd been asleep. He silenced the alarm and took a moment to orient himself to his surroundings.

Li Ann's bedroom. It wasn't totally dark; the blinds on her window were drawn, and although the mid-December sun wouldn't rise for another hour at least, the background glow of the city was enough to see dimly by.

To see Mac lying to the left of him in Li Ann's bed. Mac?

Mac, suffering from a concussion. Right.

He had to wake him up, Vic remembered. He thought for a moment about the best way to do it. "Hey, Mac," he whispered, rolling onto his left side facing Mac, propped up on one elbow. "Wake up."

No response.

He was supposed to wake Mac up and make sure he was okay, but then he was supposed to let him go back to sleep. So he wanted to wake him up as gently as possible. Without turning on the lights, for instance.

"Wake up, man," Vic whispered again.

Yeah, that wasn't working.

He reached over and gently shook Mac's shoulder. "Mac, wake up," he said, a little above a whisper this time.

Mac groaned. His head turned towards Vic and his eyes slitted open.

"Are you okay?" Vic asked softly.

"... Vic?" Mac said, looking confused.

"Yeah. How are you feeling?"

Mac frowned a little, like he was processing a tough question. Then his eyes focused properly on Vic. "No regrets," he said, and, pushing himself half-up on his own right elbow, leaned in to plant a kiss firmly on Vic's lips.

It was so unexpected that Vic didn't even manage to react until he felt Mac's tongue exploring the opening of his lips.

"Gah!" Vic managed then, pulling back. "What the hell?"

"Shit," Mac gasped in turn, letting his head fall back to the pillow and pressing his free hand to his temple. "My head feels like it's gonna split right open. How many drinks did I _have_?"

"Um," Vic said, sitting up completely and easing himself back towards the edge of the bed, away from Mac. "None. You don't remember?"

"Remember what?" Mac asked through clenched teeth. "Oh _fuck_ my head."

"Michael brought a light fixture down on top of you. You have a concussion. I'm supposed to wake you up and make sure your brain's still working. Why the hell did you _kiss_ me?"

Mac winced. "Well, I didn't remember how we'd ended up in bed together, but there you were. Guess I mis-read _that_ situation."

Vic's heart was pounding and he wasn't sure what to say or do. The normal, default response to Mac suddenly deciding to fuck with Vic by planting a sloppy kiss on his lips would obviously be to punch him in the mouth, but that clearly wasn't an option here.

Okay. Deep breaths. Mac was _not_ in his right mind, clearly. So the kiss didn't mean anything, other than that Mac lacked normal-person boundaries.

Vic tried to project a calm detachment. If Mac _had_ been fucking with him, Vic didn't need to give him the satisfaction of showing it had affected him. And if Mac was really hallucinating himself into a reality where kissing Vic made sense—well, it was Vic's duty right now to figure out if he needed to call an ambulance.

He thought back to the first-aid training he'd received on the force. _Ask some easy, factual questions._ He snapped his fingers in the air to get Mac's attention. "Hey. What's your name?"

"What??" Mac stared at him. "Vic, are you okay?"

"Um, never mind." Vic felt his face getting hot. "Look, you had bleeding in your brain, I need to check if you remember things. What's your birthday?"

"Why, so you can make a big deal out of forgetting it again?"

"Okay." Vic gave a little inward groan, and stood up. God, he was tired. "Clearly you remember things. I think it's safe for you to go back to sleep."

"What?" Mac said again, plaintively. "Vic, what the _fuck_ is going on here? What did I do?"

_You kissed me,_ was the answer, but Vic didn't really want to bring that up again.

It _felt_ like Mac was fucking with him, but with an effort Vic reminded himself that Mac was concussed, and confused. "You didn't do anything," Vic said. "You're hurt. You need to rest. I'm going to leave now, but Li Ann's sleeping in the next room if you need anything. She's going to wake you again in another couple of hours."

"Okay," Mac said. He sounded a little doubtful, but he rolled over and tugged the blankets back up to his chin. "Bye then."

* * *

Vic went to his own house first. He put on a cup of coffee to brew while he had a shower, and once he was clean, dressed, and caffeined up, he packed himself enough clothes and toiletries to last a couple of days. He could always come back to re-supply as needed.

He brought a spare duffle bag with him to Mac's place, because he wasn't sure if he'd be able to find anything to pack Mac's stuff in otherwise. Other than that day and a half during the Love case, Vic hadn't spent much time at Mac's apartment. 

There was a key to Mac's apartment on the ring along with Li Ann's car keys. When she'd handed it over before they went to sleep, Vic had been too exhausted to even ask when she and Mac had decided to exchange keys. Now he wondered if it meant something. Was it a hint that they might be getting back together?

The thought gave Vic a pang, but he decided not to worry about it. Li Ann had declared that she didn't want to be with either one of them, and Vic had resigned himself to it. If she changed her mind—well, that was her right, wasn't it?

Inside Mac's apartment, Vic kicked off his boots and headed for the bedroom.

It felt pretty weird to be here without Mac, actually. A bit transgressive. Whatever secrets Mac might keep in his private space, there was nothing to stop Vic from finding them now.

Nothing except for his actual conscience, of course. He cast a curious look at Mac's bedside table—traditional repository of sex aids and masturbation fodder—but resisted the urge to pry.

Even if Mac did sort of deserve it, after kissing Vic this morning.

Nope. Not going there. Vic went to Mac's closet, instead, and tried to pick out some comfortable clothes.

Mac didn't _have_ many comfortable clothes, actually. There wasn't a pair of jeans in the whole place, as far as Vic could tell. The closet was hung with fancy Hong Kong suits—not exactly convalescent-wear.

In the end Vic found a couple of sets of pyjamas, and a drawer full of workout clothes. That, plus socks and underwear, would have to do.

"Toothbrush," Vic reminded himself.

Mac's toothbrush sat in a cup on the edge of his bathroom sink, but there was no toothpaste in sight. Vic tried giving the mirror over the sink a gentle tug on one side and it hinged open, revealing a shelved cabinet. A half-empty tube of Colgate toothpaste rested at eye level next to a spool of dental floss; Vic tossed them both in the side pocket of the duffle bag, feeling very meticulous and responsible. There was a blue tube of hair gel in the cabinet too. Vic considered it for a moment but decided that considering his head injury, Mac probably wouldn't be doing his full hair-care routine in the next week.

Before he closed the cabinet, his eye swept casually along the pill bottles on the top level, and caught on the last one in the row, which had a prescription label. He hesitated for a moment, catching up to the realization that this was right up there with bedside-table level prying.

Anyway it was probably just out-of-date prescription painkillers from some past injury or other.

On the other hand, if it _was_ a current prescription, Mac might need it. Vic decided he'd better check the label just in case.

Once he had, he felt both justified and uncomfortable—it was a current prescription, all right, and it was for Zoloft.

What the hell was Mac doing taking an antidepressant? Didn't you have to be _depressed_ to get prescribed one of those?

There was no mistake, though—it was Mac's name on the label, and the usual Agency doctor's name listed at the bottom. Dosage 100 mg, once a day, and there were three refills left.

Vic stared at the bottle, taking a moment to uncomfortably reassess his entire conception of Mac.

Had he ever seen Mac acting depressed? Temporarily bummed out, sure, but depressed? The guy was just way too ... _shallow_ for the concept to fit.

Could being permanently obnoxious be a sign of depression? Vic somehow didn't think so.

If anything, Mac was exhaustingly _high_ energy. He never let up, never took things seriously. He tackled life with a manic abandon that alternately irritated Vic and scared him.

Manic? Well, maybe there was something there.

Vic stood back for a moment, metaphorically, and made himself think about what he really knew about Mac's recent life.

Coming back from the dead and finding your lover engaged to somebody else—well, honestly that had to have hurt.

And before that, eighteen months in prison. Vic knew from first-hand experience how that could mess a guy up, and he'd only done three months himself.

Of course it had been a rough three months; since he'd gone in as a dirty cop, he'd been in solitary confinement the whole time for his own protection.

Wait. Vic thought about that one for a second. He knew that the Tangs had put a hit out on Mac as soon as they'd found out he was alive. And Mac hadn't exactly been low-profile, back in the Hong Kong underworld. So he wouldn't have survived long in prison if he'd been put in gen-pop.

So, damn. Had Mac been in solitary for eighteen months?

Vic tried to picture that. Mac, mouthy and manic and impetuous, with nothing but blank walls to bounce off of for a year and a half.

Okay, yeah. That could have fucked him up.

Vic tucked the bottle into a pocket of his jeans, and headed for the door.


	3. Chapter 3

Li Ann woke up to the beeping of her alarm clock. Before she could turn it off she had to locate it; it was on the floor next to the futon.

The sun was up, and Vic was asleep next to her on the futon—fully clothed and on top of the covers. She hadn't heard him come in, and he didn't seem to have been woken by her alarm.

She slipped out carefully, not wanting to wake him. She immediately noticed the two duffle bags sitting on her dining table, and concluded that Vic had carried out the plan they'd discussed earlier.

Now it was her turn. She went into her bedroom to wake Mac up, bringing a glass of water.

He looked tense, even in his sleep. She hoped the pain hadn't stopped him from resting.

He didn't wake up when she said his name, so she gave his shoulder a gentle poke. He came to with a groan.

"Mac, it's morning." she said. "How are you feeling?"

"My birthday's June 22nd," he said. "Oh God I think I really fucked up with Vic."

"Um," Li Ann said, feeling mildly alarmed. "It's December 18th. You have a concussion. Do you remember what happened last night?"

"Yeah," Mac said. "I think so. Unfortunately."

He sounded coherent, at least, so Li Ann decided to put aside the confusing non-sequiturs for now and just take care of the necessary business. "You should drink some water," she said. "Do you need help sitting up?"

"Nah." Mac took a few seconds easing himself into a sitting position, wincing. "Fuck, my head."

"Could've been worse," Li Ann said philosophically.

"You got that right," Mac agreed with a shudder. "Michael is fucking psycho."

" _Was_ fucking psycho," Li Ann corrected him, handing him the glass. Every time she said it, she wondered if it would hurt this time, but she still just felt numb.

"Was," he conceded, and took a couple of sips of water before handing the glass back to her.

"What happened, Mac?" Li Ann asked. "Last night with Michael, I mean. I was so sure that he was sincere about wanting to leave all that evil behind him, like we did. And then the next thing I knew, you were missing and he was trying to run me down with his car. How did he turn on you? _Why?_ "

"Um," Mac said. "I think I kinda wish I still couldn't remember." He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. "It was all a ploy, Li Ann. From the start. He never wanted to go clean. He literally put the entire thing together to fuck with me."

"I don't understand," Li Ann said. "That really doesn't sound plausible." She thought about Mac's head injury, and wondered if he was still confused.

"It's pretty out there, yeah. But he told me himself. Right before he left me to die."

"But—why then? He had dozens of chances to betray us already. He _saved_ our lives."

"Yeah, and I didn't trust him until last night."

"You _didn't_ trust him last night," Li Ann reminded him. "You kept bringing it up. I was angry at you for holding on to the past so stubbornly and refusing to let Michael have the same chance for redemption that we've had."

"Redemption?" Mac repeated, musingly. "Is that what we're getting here?"

"But you were right," Li Ann admitted. "And if we'd trusted you instead of Michael, we would have come a lot less close to death last night."

"No, that's the thing," Mac said. "I finally did trust him in the end. In that abandoned mill. I let him back in, Li Ann. And that was the cue he was waiting for—he couldn't get his satisfaction from killing me until I'd trusted him."

Li Ann felt the whole past month rearranging itself in her head as he spoke. "But how could it _all_ have been a ploy?" she said. "Selling off all of the criminal holdings? Just to trick you into trusting him? That's pretty extreme."

"It was real for Father," Mac said. "I still believe that. And maybe as long as Father was alive, Michael was really willing to go along with it, for the old man's sake. But once Father was dead there was no control left on Michael's sadism."

Li Ann suddenly remembered an explosion—not from last night, but from two years ago in Hong Kong. The car bomb Michael had set for Mr. Fong. It was what had sent her running from the Tangs in the first place. She remembered Michael's self-satisfied smirk back-lit by the flames.

She hadn't let herself think about that since the day Michael convinced her he'd turned to the light.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "It was incredibly naïve of me to trust him again, after everything I knew he was capable of." 

Mac shrugged. "Like I said, he even got me in the end." He seemed to look inward for a long moment, then kind of shook himself a little and took a deep breath. "So, hey," he said. "I'd really like to get clean. I still smell like smoke."

Li Ann cleared her throat, and tried to push her thoughts about Michael away. "Vic brought you fresh clothes. Do you feel up for a shower?"

Mac carefully shifted around to the side of the bed and put his feet on the floor. "Yeah, I'll be okay," he said after a moment of contemplation. "Gotta use the bathroom anyway."

Mac headed gingerly off to do his ablutions, and Li Ann took the opportunity to strip the sheets. She folded them carefully inwards to contain the bits of concrete and grit that had fallen from the guys' clothes. After tucking them into the compact washing machine in her kitchen, she got her last spare set of linen out of the closet and re-made the bed.

Finished, she stood back and looked at her work. All clean and tidy.

In her mind's eye, Michael's car swerved, crashed and exploded.

"Coffee," she said to herself out loud. "I need some coffee."

* * *

She'd drunk half the cup of coffee before it occurred to her that Mac really should've finished his shower by now.

Standing at the bathroom door, she could hear the water still going. She knocked. "Mac, are you okay in there?"

No response for several seconds. Just as her hand went for the doorknob, she heard Mac say, "Fine. Don't come in."

His voice sounded like it was coming from the floor.

She opened the door.

The air was warm and steamy. The shower was going full strength. And Mac was curled up naked on the white tile floor.

Her heart skipped a beat. "What happened?" she demanded, rushing over to him. "Did you fall?" She didn't see any blood, at least. She wondered if she should run and wake Vic up. 

" 'm okay, didn't fall. I got dizzy, so I lay down," he said.

"Oh, Mac," Li Ann sighed. "It didn't occur to you to call for help?"

"Just need a little rest and I'll be okay," he insisted. "You should go."

"And leave you lying naked on the floor?" Li Ann rolled her eyes. "I'll help you back to the bed. I changed the sheets."

"Not yet," Mac said. "I didn't make it into the shower yet."

It was true, she noticed; he was dry, and his face was still smudged with soot.

"It'll be okay," she assured him lightly. "Most of the dirt was on your clothes. And I can change the sheets again later today, as soon as the first set is clean again."

"No," he insisted—and there was something in his tone that made her take him seriously. "Li Ann, I _need_ to get clean."

Ah. She thought she understood now.

She'd had a shower herself, before she'd gone to sleep, even though she'd been utterly exhausted. There'd been a lot more to wash away than just the literal dirt and grime.

Still, that didn't change the fact that Mac couldn't safely stand up in the shower right now.

"Okay," she said. "Let me help you back to the bed. And then I'll clean you."

"Huh?" he said.

"I'll use a washcloth. It won't be as good as a shower, but you'll be able to lie down the whole time."

"Um. Li Ann?," he said, sounding very hesitant. "I'm naked."

"Yes, you really are," she agreed. "It's okay."

Finally he accepted her hand. With his other hand braced on the wall, he made it to his feet.

"How are you doing?" Li Ann asked.

"Still dizzy. Not as bad as before."

"Okay, let's go."

They made their careful way together back to the bed—a journey of about eight normal paces, since the bathroom adjoined the bedroom itself. Li Ann pulled back the covers, and Mac lay down with a stifled groan.

"I'll be right back," Li Ann said.

She got a washcloth and a couple of towels, and a large bowl from the kitchen, filled with warm water.

Back at Mac's side, she set the bowl and washcloth down on her bedside table, and spread one of the towels out on the bed beside Mac. "Here," she said, "can you move over onto the towel?"

As soon as he did, she dipped the cloth into the water and wrung it out. "I'm going to start with your face," she said. "And you should talk to me. I need to know you're not crashing. The dizzy spell is making me nervous."

"Okay," he said in a very quiet voice, closing his eyes as she started rubbing at a smudge on his cheek. "Talk about what?"

"Um." The car swerving, the explosion. _Not Michael._ "What were you talking about when I first woke you up? Something about messing up with Vic?"

"Oh, that." Mac groaned, but it was a conversational groan, not an unbearable-pain groan. "This one's gonna make you laugh. When Vic woke me up earlier, I couldn't remember anything. All I knew was that I was in bed with Vic, and I didn't know why, and my head was killing me. And then he started asking me if I was okay, and being all—I don't know, weird. _Gentle_. So I figured that we must've gotten drunk and had sex, and I wanted to reassure him that I wasn't freaked out by it ... so I kissed him."

Li Ann blinked. "You what?"

"Kissed him." Mac groaned again—more of a pain-groan this time.

"What did he _do_?" Li Ann managed to ask.

"Well, he didn't punch me. He looked like he wanted to, though."

"Did he _say_ anything?"

"No, he pretty much just got all weird and left." Mac grimaced. "I think I'll just pretend I don't remember any of it, next time I see him. Pretty sure he'll go along with that happily enough."

"Mac..." Li Ann paused to re-wet the cloth and wring it out again, giving herself time to think. "Have you ever considered _telling_ Vic about your feelings for him?"

"God no," Mac said with a shudder. "He's, like, the straightest man I've ever met. He would freak."

"You flirt with him constantly," she pointed out. "And he doesn't exactly shut you down."

"He is adorably oblivious. That, and he thinks I'm just messing with him," Mac said. "I _am_ just messing with him. I know nothing's ever gonna happen."

Mac's face was finally pretty much clean, so Li Ann moved her attentions downward to his torso. This had the effect of drawing both of their attentions simultaneously to the fact that Mac's cock was half-hard, and twitching upwards.

"Sorry," Mac said, sheepishly. "It's an automatic reaction."

"To talking about Vic, or to me giving you a sponge bath?" Li Ann couldn't help asking.

"Well ... both." He squeezed his eyes shut, blushing. "Sorry," he added again.

Li Ann took a moment to contemplate the fact that Mac's naked body was stretched out in front of her.

It had been nearly three years since their disastrous escape from the Tangs. Nearly three years since they'd been lovers.

What did she feel towards him now? Tenderness, certainly. Love, but not the sort of love that demanded consummation. She was desperately glad that he was alive, considering the events of last night; and since he was hurt, she wanted to help him.

"Your body doesn't make me uncomfortable," Li Ann said. "Does it make you uncomfortable for me to be doing this? I'll stop, if it does."

"No," Mac said. "I'm just worried ... that I'm feeling more than you want me to feel."

"Ah." She sat back a little, and considered that. "You promised," she reminded him carefully, "that this time around we could be friends. Let the past be the past."

"Not going back on that," he said quickly. "I can't help what I feel, Li Ann, about you or Vic. But I won't push you to re-start our relationship." He sighed. "Fuck, I really need to get laid, don't I? By somebody I don't work with. And ideally not a criminal."

She allowed herself a slight smile. "Maybe," she said, and started washing Mac's arms.

"What about you?" he asked. "I mean, have you thought about getting out there? Dating someone else?"

Li Ann gave the question a moment of serious consideration. "Not really," she admitted. "After I put my engagement to Vic on hold—"

"On hold?" Mac interrupted. "I thought you broke it off."

"I guess that's more accurate," Li Ann admitted. "But at the time I told him—and myself—that I was putting it on hold. Giving myself time to think about the whole concept of _being_ with someone." She finished his right arm and moved around to his other side so that she could reach his left without leaning over him. Since he was lying on the right-hand side of the queen-sized bed, she had to climb up on the bed beside him to do it. She knelt facing him, and lifted his arm into her lap. "I'm pretty sure that Vic still thinks that I broke up with him because of you," she said, resuming washing him.

"Didn't you?" Mac asked.

She thought about it. "Maybe, yeah. But not quite in the way Vic thinks." She balled up the washcloth, and squeezed his hand. "When I got together with Vic, I was grieving for you. I'm not sure I ever really wanted to be _with_ him, exactly; I just desperately wanted him to distract me from the ... the howling void I felt inside of me." She felt tears pricking her eyes, but she blinked them away with a tiny ironic laugh. "Probably not something I should tell Vic, huh? When you turned out not to be dead, I didn't need him for that anymore."

"But then you didn't want to be with me, either," he said in a small voice. "That was the bit that I never understood. Probably I was way more of an asshole to Vic than I needed to be, because I was so confused. If you ever really loved me, why didn't you want me back when you found out I wasn't dead?"

"Exactly how much of an asshole to Vic _do_ you actually need to be?" Li Ann asked in a mildly teasing tone. She knew she was evading the question. She needed to think about it.

"Um, a little bit. Obviously. Keeps him on his toes." The look he gave her, though, said he knew exactly what she was doing.

"Okay, please don't be hurt by this, but Mac, I think the only reason I was ever with _you_ was to survive the Tangs."

Mac looked puzzled. "I wasn't much help with that. Considering Michael's jealous streak, you would've been better off without me."

"I don't mean physical survival. I meant—the survival of my mind. My _soul_." She sighed. "It was a criminal empire. No matter how much I loved the godfather, part of me always understood that he was a hard and dangerous man, who did evil in the world. And that was what Michael aspired to be, and what they wanted _us_ to become. And I didn't have anything in my past to hold on to to tell me that that wasn't who I was. I mean, you know where I came from." She felt Mac squeeze her hand. "But there _you_ were. And it felt to me like the evil couldn't touch you. Like, it couldn't even come _close_ , there was a two-metre radius of good all around you."

His lips twitched into a little smile at the image, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Not that I don't appreciate your attempt to saint me, Li Ann, but I think you might be over-romanticizing a bit. I was all-in with the Tangs, as long as we were with them. The godfather saved me from the streets. I owed him everything, and I had nowhere else to go."

"Until you hit a line you couldn't cross," Li Ann reminded him.

"Well, yeah."

"If you hadn't been there," Li Ann took a deep breath, "I think I might have crossed that line. It would have shaken me, but I would've let it become part of my story of who I was. A Triad gangster. Ruthless. I would've thought I had no choice but to go along with Michael, to become the person that he wanted me to be. And whatever was left of me afterwards—it wouldn't have been _me_."

"No, Li Ann," Mac said with soft conviction, squeezing her hand harder. "No. Maybe you think that, but I know you better than that. You would have figured something out."

Suddenly Li Ann felt a surge of emotion that she didn't know what to do with. And without realizing that she had formed the intention, she found herself leaning over and kissing Mac on the lips.

She heard his quick, sharp inhalation; she'd surprised him. Her eyes were closed, so she couldn't see his expression. He didn't pull away, nor did he try to deepen the kiss; he followed her lead, lips gently touching and nibbling without opening.

She let herself continue for the space of five breaths ... then ten. And then she pulled away abruptly, as her guilt caught up to her.

"Li Ann?" Mac whispered. His eyes were very wide, and shining.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice catching a little in her throat. "That wasn't fair. I shouldn't have done it."

"I really don't understand," Mac said plaintively.

"I love you, Mac. I never stopped loving you. But I don't want to be _with_ you, and I really shouldn't have just kissed you."

Mac's fingers twitched and he made a slightly strangled noise in his throat. "Fucking hell," he said, but pensively. "I have a concussion, so I'm not sure I'm following this. Humour me for a minute?"

"What do you mean?"

"Just ... answer the questions. Yes or no. You love me?"

She hesitated. She was scared she'd really fucked things up with Mac, again. There might be no going back from this.

But in terms of the yes-or-no question, she _had_ just said it. "Yes," she admitted.

"And I love you?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Isn't that a question for _you_?"

"I'm looking for your perspective."

"Okay." Her heart was racing. "Yes."

"And you wanted to kiss me just now."

"Yes." She could hardly deny the reality of the past minute.

"But you don't want to date me."

"Correct," she said, to avoid the ambiguity of answering a negative question with a 'yes.'

"Do you want to have sex with me?"

She took a breath, and thought about it.

Mac was laid out naked in front of her, as lean and strong and beautiful as he'd ever been, minus a few scrapes and bruises. His cock was very much standing at attention, letting her know his own body's involuntary answer to the question. 

But the thought of sex—of revisiting that type of intimate relationship—it had no appeal. "No," she said, doing her best to soften the word.

"No for the moment because my brain might start bleeding and kill me, or no for forever?"

"No for forever," she said, surprised even as she said the words at how sure she felt.

Mac was silent for a moment. She hoped that he wouldn't argue with her. She really didn't want to have to deal with that.

"Do you think that you might want to kiss me again?" he asked finally.

She nearly answered with a quick no—the kiss a moment ago had been so obviously ill-advised—but she stopped herself, and considered the question.

It was a different question than the one about dating, or the one about sex. And she _had_ wanted to kiss him in that moment. "Maybe," she admitted finally.

After another moment of thoughtful silence, Mac gave her a plaintive look. "But what does that _mean_?" he asked.

"That's not a yes-or-no question," she pointed out—ducking the question, since she really had no idea what the answer was.

"Okay," he said. "Um. Do you want to kiss me again _now_?"

"I don't want to hurt you," Li Ann said carefully.

"Actually," Mac said, "When you kissed me a minute ago, my headache eased up a bit."

Of course that wasn't what she'd meant, but she decided to follow his lead with a bit of teasing. The emotional intensity of this conversation was exhausting her. "That's because all of the blood from your brain went somewhere else," she said.

He grinned unabashedly at her. "That is probably one hundred percent physiologically true."

Catching his grin, Li Ann realized: _yes_ , she wanted to kiss him again.

And she wasn't sure at all that it wasn't a terrible idea, but in this moment it felt so right.

And so she did.


	4. Chapter 4

Vic woke up to the smell of lunch.

Li Ann was in the kitchen, opening take-away Chinese food containers. "Hi, Vic," she greeted him. "It's almost time for Mac's noon wake-up. I figured we could all use some lunch."

"You didn't have to let me sleep so long," Vic said, rubbing his eyes. "I could've spelled you again at ten."

She shrugged. "I was awake; you needed the sleep. I'll probably nap after lunch, if that's okay."

"Sure," Vic said. "How was Mac this morning?"

She hesitated fractionally, then said "Fine," in a way that left Vic slightly worried.

"How was his, um, memory?"

Another hesitation, before she said, "There seem to be gaps. But he did remember what happened; he remembers Michael turning on him."

Vic entertained a moment of hope that last night's kiss had fallen into one of the gaps. It seemed plausible—maybe even likely, considering how confused Mac had seemed at the time. "Overall, then, he seemed okay?"

"He had some trouble with dizziness. He made it to the bathroom but he couldn't stand up long enough to have a shower. I washed his face for him in bed."

Vic gave a glance towards Li Ann's dining table. "Do you think he'll be okay for lunch?"

"I was thinking he could eat it in bed. Do you think you could wake him up, while I get the food into dishes?"

"Sure," Vic said, trying to sound like he had no hesitation—like the last wake-up had gone smoothly.

So Vic went into Li Ann's bedroom, and braced himself for another interaction with Mac.

Mac was tucked under the covers, and as Li Ann had mentioned, his face was clean. There was still some grit and dust visible in his hair, but Vic supposed that would have to wait until Mac could shower properly.

"Hey man," Vic said gruffly, giving Mac a gentle shoulder poke. "Wake up."

Mac's eyes blinked blearily open and fixed on Vic. "What's up?" he said. 

"It's noon, and Li Ann's getting lunch ready. You should probably eat."

"Not hungry," Mac mumbled, closing his eyes again.

"You should eat anyway. Look—do you, um, remember when I woke you up before?"

Mac's eyes seemed to squeeze tighter shut. "No. Why?"

Well, that was a relief. "No reason. You seemed pretty out of it." He glanced back towards the kitchen. He couldn't quite see Li Ann from this angle, but he could hear her still opening cupboards and drawers. "Hey, um. This morning when I went by your place to get you some clothes, I found these pills. It looked like maybe you're supposed to be taking them, so I brought them." He pulled the Zoloft out of his pocket.

Mac crawled himself into a sitting position and took the bottle, squinting at it. "Yeah," he said after a minute. "I was supposed to take it in the morning." He started trying to open the bottle, but he seemed to be having trouble with the child-proof cap.

"Here, let me," Vic said. He took the bottle back and quickly extracted a pill to give to Mac. "Do you want a glass of water?"

Rather than answering, Mac just swallowed the pill dry.

The bottle was still in Vic's hand, and he wasn't sure what to do with it. "Um, does Li Ann know you're taking these?" he asked, feeling awkward.

Mac's eyes flicked towards the kitchen. "No," he said in a quick undertone. "You don't really need to tell her, right?"

"It's none of my business," Vic said with a shrug. Mac shot him a grateful look, just as the rattling of dishes and a delicious aroma announced Li Ann's arrival in the room. Vic slipped the pills back into his pocket discreetly, and went to help her with the dishes.

He was a little worried when he saw the bowls of unidentifiable authentic Chinese food on the lacquered tea tray that Li Ann handed him.

"That's for Mac," she said, obviously catching his expression. "This is yours." Vic's had a plate of General Tao chicken, and a fork.

"Ah." He smiled. "Thanks."

It turned out that Li Ann had planned lunch in bed for all three of them, not just Mac. Mac sat propped up against the headboard with pillows behind his back, balancing his tray on his lap, while Li Ann and Vic sat cross-legged at opposite ends of the foot of the bed, eating from their own trays. It was very cozy.

Despite having said that he wasn't hungry, Mac did pick slowly at his food, eating some.

The initial silence of three people tucking into their food stretched out a little too long, becoming awkward.

 _Six and a half days of this to go,_ Vic reflected ruefully.

"How are you doing?" Li Ann asked Mac, finally.

He blinked at her for a moment before answering. "Not bad," he said finally. "Considering." He looked at her and Vic. "What about you two? Were you hurt at all?"

They both shook their heads. "We got off easy," Vic said.

Remembering again how close they'd all come to being blasted to smithereens, he felt a residual shudder.

"What about the Director?" Mac asked.

"Dobrinsky called earlier this morning," Li Ann said. "She's okay. He's taken her home. She's going to need a week or two off work, too. So we're all officially on vacation until after New Year's. Mac just needs to get in to the Agency on the twenty-fourth for his check-up."

"Christmas eve?" Mac said.

"At nine in the morning. One of us can drive you."

Mac nodded, and ate a morsel of something tentacle-ish. "Any word on Paul?"

Li Ann shook her head. "I forgot to mention him to Dobrinsky. I will, next time he checks in."

"Who exactly is Paul, again?" Vic interjected. Mac and Li Ann kept mentioning him like he was significant, but Vic couldn't even put a face to the name.

"Michael's new right-hand man," Li Ann said. "I didn't see him around the mill last night."

"Doesn't mean he wasn't there," Mac pointed out.

"True," Li Ann agreed. "But I haven't seen him since ... last week, I think?"

Mac nodded. "At the restaurant."

"What restaurant?" Vic asked.

"That 'family meeting' we told you about," Li Ann reminded him. "Michael offered to pay us dividends for our time with the Tangs."

"Really?" Vic raised an eyebrow. "How much?"

"Seven hundred K," she said.

Vic whistled. "And you said _no_?"

Mac gave him a look. "You would've done the same. It was blood money."

"Well..." Vic shrugged. "That's a lot of money."

Mac turned back to Li Ann. "If he wasn't there last night," he said, "he might not know yet that Michael's dead."

"He must at least be suspecting it by now," Li Ann said. "And if he goes to the mill—he might see Michael's car, it probably hasn't been removed yet."

"Do you guys think he's going to be a problem?" Vic asked. Mac and Li Ann both looked deadly serious, and Vic still couldn't really see why.

"Does he know where you live?" Mac asked Li Ann, instead of answering Vic directly. "Did Michael?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. I didn't tell him. But I can't be sure."

"Are you afraid this guy is going to hunt us down?" Vic asked. "Michael's _accountant_?"

Li Ann raised an eyebrow. "I didn't say accountant."

"Well, what the hell is he, then?"

Li Ann and Mac shared a look. A capital-L Look, actually.

"Well?" Vic prompted.

"Michael called him his brother," Mac said.

"And? What does that mean?"

"Yes," Mac said grimly. "That's the question."

Vic felt singularly unenlightened. But Li Ann was sharing another dark and meaningful look with Mac.

"Guys?" Vic said. "Is there something you're still not telling me?"

Instead of answering him, Li Ann said something in Cantonese.

Mac replied in the same language. They had a quick, spirited back-and-forth, which ended with Mac staring glumly down into his food and Li Ann curling her arms around her knees, looking worried.

So. There was _definitely_ something they were still not telling him.

"Okay, throw me a _clue_ , you guys," Vic begged. "Should I start walking around the apartment with a gun in my holster?"

"That would probably be a good idea," Mac said.

Li Ann nodded. She uncurled and got off the bed, leaving her tray behind. Vic looked back over his shoulder to track her; she went into her walk-in closet and emerged a moment later strapping on her shoulder holster.

Vic started to feel a bit scared. He hadn't meant that as a serious suggestion. "For real?" he said.

"Better safe than sorry," Li Ann said. "Where did you leave yours?"

"Back at my house when I went there to shower," Vic said. "I thought we _were_ safe now."

"And _how_ long have you worked for the Agency?" Mac asked.

"You can carry Mac's for now," Li Ann said. "He's in no shape to use it."

Mac looked for a moment like he was going to protest, but then he stopped himself with a defeated little sigh. "True," he conceded. "Just—take good care of it, okay man?"

Next thing Vic knew, Li Ann had fetched Mac's gun and holster for him and Vic was adjusting the leather straps to his own torso size.

And he _still_ didn't understand who this guy Paul was supposed to be.

"Better pull the curtains on the balcony," Mac said.

"Right," Li Ann agreed, going over to tug the floor-to-ceiling drapes shut across her dramatic view of Lake Ontario, though not before double-checking the security lock on the sliding glass door.

"We're on the fourteenth floor," Vic protested. "Why are you two suddenly acting like we're under siege?"

"It's just a precaution," Li Ann said.

Mac muttered something in Cantonese in reply.

"And would you stop _doing_ that?" Vic said, exasperated. "What the hell are you hiding from me about this guy?"

"Nothing we actually know," Li Ann said in a placating tone. "Just some guesses."

"Well?" Vic tried not to growl. "My ass is on the line here too. Fill me in!"

Silence. Both Li Ann and Mac looked shifty. Of the two, Mac looked shiftier.

Vic had forgotten how much he hated it when they sibling-ed up on him.

"You just said that Michael called this guy his brother," Vic prompted them, hoping to crack that brick wall somehow. And then he remembered Mac's comment from the night before. "Your replacement?"

Mac gave a little shrug.

"So what's this guy's angle? Why do you think he might be coming for us? And with what resources?"

"No resources," Li Ann said. "The godfather and Michael sold off almost all of the Tang criminal holdings. That was real. And Michael burned through the rest of his inner circle the night we took down Chow."

"You know who wasn't there that night?" Mac said, musingly. "Paul. Kind of a weird omission, don't you think?"

"Protecting him?" Li Ann suggested.

Mac shrugged.

"And?" Vic prompted again. "Can this guy fight?"

"Oh yeah," Mac said with feeling.

"Like Mac's mirror image," Li Ann added. "It was eerie."

"You _saw_ him fight?" Vic asked. "You _fought_ him? _When?_ " He was starting to feel like he'd missed a whole chapter, somehow.

"I think you were with Jackie," Li Ann said. "Staking out the King."

"Do you think Paul _knew_ he was my replacement?" Mac asked, musingly.

"Certainly once he met you," Li Ann said. "Maybe not before."

"Guys, you're _still_ not explaining this properly," Vic said, trying not to snap. "I keep feeling like you're talking over my head, even when you're speaking English."

And all he accomplished with _that_ outburst was to prompt another quick back-and-forth argument in Cantonese.

Which it seemed like Mac lost, from the way he hunched down, scowling, at the end of it.

Li Ann gave a bit of an upward tilt to her chin, and looked directly at Vic. "We think Paul was Michael's lover."

"What? Seriously?" Vic's brain skittered around in about three different directions simultaneously. "And that's why you think he's coming after us? But ... when you kept saying he was Mac's _replacement_..."

"I _told_ you he'd make the connection," Mac muttered under his breath, not making eye contact.

Vic stared at Mac. "You and Michael?"

Mac kind of just hunched inwards.

Vic felt Li Ann's hand on his shoulder. "Don't freak out," she said warningly. "You're better than that."

" _I'm_ better than that?" Vic choked out. "I'm not the one who was secretly fucking Michael fucking _Tang_."

"And this is why I didn't want to tell him," Mac said, still talking more to his lap than to anyone in the room.

"Is _that_ why Michael nearly fucking killed us all? It was a fucking _lovers' quarrel_?" A red, panicky haze seemed to be descending on Vic.

Li Ann jerked at his elbow. "Living room. Now," she insisted fiercely.

Vic was suddenly uncomfortably aware of the guns they were both packing. Emotions were running way too fucking high.

He took a deep, shaky breath and let her drag him out of the room.

She centred him in the living room and glared at him. "Get a grip," she said. "I told Mac it would be okay to let you know he was bisexual, that it wouldn't destroy his relationship with you. Don't make a liar out of me."

"Relationship?" Vic repeated in a sort of strangled yelp.

She couldn't know about the fucking kiss.

"Your _friendship_. And don't you dare try to deny that you have one." She took a step back, still pinning him down with her glare. She pointed at the futon. " _Sit_ ," she ordered him, like she was talking to a recalcitrant puppy. "Now you stay _here_ , and shut up. I'm going to make sure that Mac's okay, then I'll be back."

Vic sat.

He could hear Li Ann's and Mac's voices murmuring in the other room.

Mac and Michael. God _damn_.

Vic felt the bottle of Zoloft in his pocket pressing against his leg, reminding him of earlier in the day when he'd discovered _that_ secret in Mac's bathroom cabinet, and how he'd thought at the time that his whole understanding of Mac had been shaken.

Well, that was peanuts compared to this.

"Mac's going to try to sleep again," Li Ann said, coming back into the room. "So you have two hours to come to terms with his sexuality and get ready to be decent to him when we wake him up. Starting—" she literally held up a stopwatch for Vic to see, "—now."

Vic cleared his throat and gave the stopwatch a bit of a wild glance. Fifteen seconds had gone by already. Fucking hell, what did she want him to say? "This is a bit of a shock," he managed to squeak out.

"Is it?" Li Ann asked patiently.

"Yes!" Vic insisted.

Except that even as he said it, he was retroactively realizing that an awful lot of the shock had been the sheer magnitude of the _Oh, that explains it_ feeling.

This morning's brain-addled kiss.

An accumulation of the hundreds of times Mac had snapped his teeth at Vic, grinned at him over his sunglasses, found ridiculous excuses to touch him too much, teased him about his truck and his clothes, randomly broken into Vic's apartment and crawled into his fucking _bed_....

Okay, yeah, there had been signs.

Not to mention the simmering, crackling tension between Mac and Michael every time they came within 10 metres of each other.

Well, Vic had read that as them wanting to kill each other—and he hadn't been wrong.

"Michael," Vic said finally. "How ... I mean, _when_?"

"In Hong Kong," Li Ann said. "And if you want to know more, you'll have to ask Mac."

"Okay, but are we talking about a one-time thing?" Vic asked. "Or something more?"

"More." Li Ann gave a little sigh, and finally sat down next to Vic on the futon instead of looming over him and glaring. She was still holding the stopwatch, though. "To be honest I don't know a lot of details, Vic. I did know it was happening, back in Hong Kong—they weren't as discreet around me as they were around everyone else—but we didn't _talk_ about it, and I knew better than to ask. Mac only started talking openly to me about it recently—and I mean _really_ recently. After Michael showed up here in Toronto, with Paul at his side."

"But _you_ and Mac were lovers in Hong Kong," Vic pointed out.

Li Ann nodded.

"And Michael wanted to _marry_ you," Vic added.

"Michael wanted to possess me," she corrected him.

"But how could you stand Mac being with Michael when you and Mac were together?"

Li Ann shrugged. "It never felt like what Mac and I had was in any sort of relation to whatever Mac and Michael had. They were like parallel realities."

"But they intersected at Mac."

"True," Li Ann admitted. "If you ask _him_ to tell you what it was like, he'll probably have a different perspective."

Vic shook his head. He could not, at this moment, imagine wanting to talk directly to Mac about any of this.

Suddenly he thought of a whole other aspect of this revelation. "Has he been with any other men?"

"In Hong Kong, yes. Not since coming here, as far as I know."

"Has he been ... I mean ..." Vic's phrasing tripped awkwardly over the taboo of the question he wanted to ask. "Is he healthy?"

Li Ann gave him a blank look. "He has a concussion."

"I mean ..." _Is he clean?_ was probably not a better way to put it. Vic took a breath and racked his brains for a minimally-offensive phrasing. "Is he HIV-negative?"

Li Ann's eyes widened. "I assume so," she said after a moment. "I mean, we'd know if he wasn't, right?"

At which point Vic remembered that he had gone through Mac's medicine cabinet this morning, and the only prescription bottle in there had been the Zoloft. "Yeah," he said. "You're right. Never mind."

"So are you going to be okay with this?" Li Ann asked. "With him?"

Deep breath time. What the hell _was_ Vic feeling about all this?

"When I was a cop," he said, "The guys used to use 'fag' as an insult. And I was no exception." He looked at Li Ann. "Nobody at the Agency does that. I don't think I ever really noticed that before. But I guess I stopped doing it, too."

Li Ann looked thoughtful. "I can't imagine the Director letting you get away with it."

Suddenly a memory came back to Vic. "Oh, that's right! She _didn't_. It was my first week at the Agency. We were discussing a suspect, and I used that word, and—" He gave a wry half-chuckle, remembering. "She _brutalized_ me. I think she lectured me for a fucking _hour_. I sure as hell never did it again." He frowned thoughtfully. "Hey, does _she_ know about Mac?"

"You mean about him and Michael?"

"Well, yeah, but I mean—about Mac being gay."

"Bisexual," Li Ann corrected him. "I'm sure she does. It's not the sort of thing she'd miss, is it?"

"But you said he hasn't been with any men since he came to Canada."

"As far as I know," Li Ann shrugged. "Anyway, I'm sure she's noticed ... um." She hesitated. "I'm not actually sure if Mac would be okay with me talking to you about this."

"About what?" Vic asked. It seemed to him that the whole conversation so far had been pretty damn intrusively personal.

Li Ann grimaced. "But I think I have to. I don't want you to freak out on him again when you notice."

"When I notice _what_?"

Li Ann's fingers tapped nervously against the stopwatch. "He has a bit of a crush on you."

"Oh," Vic said weakly, swallowing back a little surge of gay-panic-induced bile. "That."

"That," Li Ann confirmed. "So you _had_ noticed? I thought you must have, but Mac was sure you hadn't, and then when you reacted the way you did just now in my bedroom, I thought Mac had been right after all."

"No, he was right," Vic said. "Or, I mean—I guess that I'd noticed, on some level, but I hadn't _noticed_ that I'd noticed. And then when you guys told me about Mac and Michael, a lot of things just clicked into place ... " He cleared his throat. "Li Ann, he _kissed_ me this morning. Guys don't _do_ that. How the hell was I _supposed_ to react?"

"Um," Li Ann said, "He's really sorry about that. Try not to hold it against him—he had no idea what was going on, he'd just woken up with no memory of how he ended up in bed with you. He leapt to the wrong conclusion."

"Wait, he told you about that? I thought he'd blacked it out by the time he woke up again. Fuck."

"Oops," Li Ann said, looking suddenly guilty. "I don't think I was supposed to let you know that he remembered."

"Oh, great, you're conspiring against me?"

"Not _against_ ," Li Ann insisted. She gave a sort of frustrated half-sigh. "It's complicated. I don't want him to get hurt."

"Him? What about me?" Vic didn't like the way his voice had nearly turned into a whine on that last syllable. He gruffed his throat clear to try to retroactively cover it up. "Li Ann, Mac loves messing with me. Now with all of this—Jesus Christ, what am I supposed to do when he comes on to me?"

Li Ann rolled her eyes a bit. "He's not going to come on to you. Give him a little credit, Vic, he does have _some_ self-control."

"Not a lot," Vic muttered.

"Look, it's not so different from—okay, we all know that he's still attracted to me." She looked a little uncomfortable as she said it. "But he's not going to _act_ on it. He understands that I don't want to restart our relationship, and he respects that. Just like he understands that you're straight."

"But he flirts with me," Vic protested.

Li Ann acknowledged that with a thoughtful nod. "Well, to a certain extent, that's just how he is. I mean, watch him interacting with _anybody_."

"But especially with me," Vic insisted.

"Well, maybe that will change now. I think he felt like it was safe to flirt with you when you didn't know he really meant it. Now ..." she shrugged. "You know, if he does something you're not comfortable with, you could try _telling_ him how you feel, and asking him not to do it."

Vic thought about that. About asking Mac flat-out to stop pushing at Vic's boundaries with all of those ridiculous little transgressive gestures. To start just treating him like a normal guy-friend-coworker.

Why the hell did that thought give Vic a pang of prospective regret?

"Anyway, why _me_?" Vic asked, to distract himself from that uncomfortable thought. "It doesn't make sense. Honestly Li Ann, I've been kind of a jerk to him since the first time we met."

"Well," Li Ann made a wry expression, "That's not necessarily a turn-off for Mac. Remember, he loved Michael."

So, gallows humour.

Vic thought about that one for a second—really thought about it, remembering the tightly-wound ball of barely-suppressed violence that had been Michael Tang.

"You know," he said, "Let's not joke about that."

Li Ann squeezed her eyes shut briefly. "You're right," she said, opening them again. "I shouldn't have said that, it was inappropriate. And actually you're _nothing_ like Michael, and that's probably as appealing to Mac as it was to me."

Well, that was an interesting thought. Vic almost opened his mouth to ask Li Ann to expand, please, upon the things that she had found appealing about Vic.

But no. Best not to re-open old wounds.

"So are you satisfied that I've calmed down enough?" he asked instead. "I mean, this all is going to take me some time to get used to. I sure as hell can't promise that I'm not going to be _uncomfortable_ around Mac for a while. But do you at least trust me not to be a complete homophobic asshole?"

Li Ann nodded, and then wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug. "Thanks for being who you are, Vic."

"Okay then. Give me the stopwatch. You said you were going to nap after lunch."

"Right," Li Ann said, looking weary and grateful. "Do you mind if I close the curtains in here and sleep on the futon?"

Vic shook his head. "I brought a book with me from my place. I'll sit and read in the kitchen."

Li Ann hugged him again, fiercely. "I love you," she whispered.

Vic swallowed against a lump in his throat. He understood what she was saying, and it wasn't the kind of love that he had wanted from her back when he'd imagined getting married and having a life together ... but he was glad to hear it, anyway.

And he was glad that he'd managed to come through today's crisis still deserving of her love.


	5. Chapter 5

Vic perched on the edge of Li Ann's bed. "Hey, Mac," Vic whispered, poking him.

"Mmph?" Mac blinked up at him hazily.

"It's wake-up time again."

Mac groaned. "Fuck," he said.

"Your head?" Vic asked, with a bit of a sympathetic wince. "Still pretty bad, huh?"

"Yeah." Mac closed his eyes.

"You can go back to sleep in a minute. Just talk to me a little first so I know you're okay." Not that talking to Mac was a thing Vic really wanted to be doing right now, but if Mac's brain had started bleeding again and Vic didn't notice because he was too chicken to talk to him, Li Ann would definitely kill him. And Vic would deserve it. "Do you remember where you are?"

Mac opened his eyes again and seemed to think about it for a second. "Li Ann's place," he said finally.

"That's right." Well, that was a coherent exchange. "Okay, you passed the test. You can go back to sleep now."

"Wait," Mac said. "Did Li Ann talk to you? About me and Michael?"

"Yeah."

"So are we cool?"

"Um. Yeah." Assuming that 'are we cool' meant 'can I trust you not to punch my lights out,' anyway.

"Okay." Mac looked relieved. "Good."

"Hey," Vic said, feeling his conscience pricking him a bit. "I'm sorry about yelling at you earlier."

"No, it's okay," Mac said. "I understand."

Actually the more understanding Mac was, the guiltier Vic felt, especially now that he saw Mac lying there all hurt and helpless. "It wasn't okay," Vic said. "I didn't have a right to react like that. You and Michael—fundamentally it's none of my business."

"Well," Mac said, "My history with Michael did nearly get us all killed. You weren't wrong about that."

"The fact that Michael was a fucking _monster_ nearly got us all killed," Vic corrected him. "And the fact that the rest of us didn't listen to you when you told us not to trust him."

"I could've been more specific," Mac reflected. "About just how well I knew him. Might've helped."

"You mean, if you'd brought up the fact that he was your ex?" Vic shook his head. "I don't see how. We all knew Li Ann was his ex, and she was pretty reluctant to trust him too. Didn't stop the Director from bringing him in when she thought she could use him."

Mac gave a bit of a tight, ironic grin. "I knew some things about Michael that Li Ann didn't."

"Like what?"

Mac closed his eyes. "Never mind. Not important."

"Okay." Vic stood up, taking that as a dismissal. As he stood, though, the pill bottle rattled in his pocket—the Zoloft—and he remembered that he'd wanted to check in with Mac about that when Li Ann wasn't around. Considering how tightly together they were all living, he might not have a better opportunity for a while. He took the bottle out of his pocket. "Hey, Mac," he said. "What do you want me to do with this?"

Mac opened his eyes again, and took a moment to process the question. "I'll take it," he said, holding out his hand.

Vic didn't hand it over. "And, um, put it where?" he pointed out.

Mac gave a little moan. "Okay, you keep it."

"I mean, I can do that. But—you said you didn't want Li Ann to know? It says on the bottle you're supposed to take one every day."

"First thing in the morning, yeah."

"I'll try to be discreet about it," Vic promised. "We're only all stuck together for a week, hopefully."

"Thanks," Mac said.

"Just—" Vic didn't quite want to let this go. "Maybe you don't _need_ to hide it from Li Ann? Maybe it would be better if you didn't?"

"Ugh," Mac said. "Why do you two keep wanting me to tell each other things?"

"What things?"

Mac rolled his eyes. "As in, Li Ann made me come out to you. And that went so well."

Vic tried to think of something comforting to say that wasn't an empty reassurance or a lie. "Well," he said finally, "Honesty is probably the best policy in the long run."

Mac made a little gagging noise. Vic was briefly alarmed, until he realized it was an editorial comment rather than a concussion symptom.

"Seriously, man," Vic insisted. "Okay, I freaked out a little, I'll own it. But now I know, and, um, we-can-still-be-friends." He pushed that last bit out fast, before he could think better of it.

Mac blinked up at him. "We're _friends_?" he said, in a tone of exaggeratedly happy surprise.

Okay, he wasn't blinking, he was fluttering his fucking eyelashes.

He was _flirting_.

Vic swallowed down a tiny bit of panic, and tried to process the moment calmly.

Clearly there was absolutely no danger that Mac was about to jump Vic's bones.

Mac was just being Mac.

In fact, considering the physical state he was in, and the pain he was suffering, Mac must be putting a considerable _effort_ into being Mac.

So what was going on here? Mac was trying to act normal, is what. Normal for him, anyway.

"Shut up, Mac," Vic finally muttered, because one attempt at normalcy deserved another one.

And then he recalled the pill bottle in his hand, and realized that Mac had got him completely off the topic of telling Li Ann about the Zoloft.

He held the bottle up again and rattled it. "It's none of my business, I get that," he said. "But the logistics'll be easier if you tell Li Ann. And she'd probably want to know. She cares about you."

"Exactly," Mac said with a sigh. "Look, it's nothing, I don't want to worry her."

"Okay," Vic said. _None of my business._ It was a true assessment. 

But so was _we're friends_.

Tucking the bottle back into his pocket, he gave the topic one more little push. "Look, if you ever, um, need somebody to talk to..."

"Oh God," Mac kind of groaned, "It's not like that. The Director just makes me take them because of the nightmares."

Vic frowned. "Nightmares?"

"She'd bugged my bedroom."

"Ah." Much as Vic _wished_ that could come as a shock to him, it didn't—she'd done the same thing to him. "That seems a little extreme, though."

"Spying on her employees' private lives?"

"Well, yeah, but that's the Director for you. No, I mean medicating you just because of some bad dreams. Actually—how the hell did her surveillance even catch that?" Vic entertained a brief, terrifying vision of psychic surveillance. Maybe something in the infrared, or with magnets.

"Well, I guess I woke up screaming sometimes. A lot." Mac gave an uncomfortable shrug. "The pills help. Li Ann doesn't need to know."

"Okay," Vic agreed, to appease him, even though the more Mac said the more Vic wished he'd talk to Li Ann. "Our little secret. Now you should get some rest."

* * *

The rest of the day passed blessedly uneventfully. Vic kept his gun close at hand and the curtains drawn, but Paul did not arrive scaling the outside of the building with a knife between his teeth, or in any other manner. Vic handled the next two wake-ups, letting Li Ann sleep for six hours straight. His interactions with Mac were straightforward and prosaic. Mac made it to the bathroom by himself with no problems at the 4 p.m. wake-up, and at 6 p.m. Vic brought him ramen noodles in bed. Li Ann woke up at 7 p.m., ready to spell Vic and take on the night shift, and Vic collapsed gratefully onto the futon, falling almost immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The next day—more of the same. Li Ann slept from 5 a.m. till noon, so Vic had no trouble giving Mac his antidepressant in privacy in the morning. In the afternoon Li Ann and Vic cleaned their guns and then played cribbage.

Mid-afternoon Mac spent some time awake. Li Ann and Vic moved their game to the floor of the bedroom to keep him company, and they chatted idly. Through what Vic knew was careful, deliberate effort on his own part, and in clear unspoken cooperation with Li Ann and Mac, they kept the topics light. No discussion of Michael, or Paul, or anybody's sexuality. They made joking plans for an Agency bowling tournament, and tried to imagine what kind of custom balls Murphy and Camier would bring to the party. They each described their ideal vacation. Vic was the only one who mentioned camping.

That evening, they passed the 48-hour mark from Mac's injury. Mac reported that his pain and the feeling of mental fog were both decreasing, and he hadn't had any dizziness since the previous day.

"That's great, man," Vic said. "Sounds like you're on the mend. We can stop waking you up every two hours."

"Thank God for that," Mac said.

And then Li Ann put her hand to her mouth and burst into tears.

All three of them were sitting on Li Ann's bed at the time. For the first few seconds, Vic was startled into inaction, and Mac seemed to be in the same state. They met each other's eyes over Li Ann's bent head, frozen.

Li Ann covered her face with both hands and sobbed.

Mac moved in carefully and put an arm around her shoulders. He didn't say anything, he just held her.

Vic hung back, wanting to hug her too, but torn. Mac was already in there. If Vic put his arm around Li Ann too, he'd also be almost hugging Mac. And he didn't want to give a suggestion of rivalry, of tugging Li Ann in two directions—not in the state she was in now.

Mac must've seen his hesitation, though, and possibly intuited the reasons for it, because he caught Vic's eye and motioned with his free hand that Vic should join them.

It would have felt wrong to refuse, so Vic eased in carefully on the other side of Li Ann. He tucked his arm around her lower down than Mac's, around the small of her back. He was careful not to touch Mac.

That effort was wasted, however, when Mac reached around front of Li Ann and took Vic's other hand, and squeezed it, and didn't let go.

Li Ann, still heaving with gut-wrenching sobs, tucked her forehead in against Vic's shoulder.

The way Mac was holding Vic's hand, they were encircling Li Ann entirely in a three-person hug. That was okay, Vic decided. It wasn't inappropriate.

All the same, Vic felt very off-balance.

He wasn't sure whether it was okay to look at Mac, but when he fleetingly did, he saw that Mac was only looking at Li Ann.

Minutes passed. Nobody spoke, or shifted. Li Ann's sobs finally slowed down and quieted, and Vic could hear Mac's soft breathing.

"Sorry," Li Ann finally said, sniffling.

"It's okay," Mac said. "It's okay."

"I mean, it made no sense for me to do that _now_ , when I finally know you're safe." She swiped her very wet nose with the back of her hand, and grimaced.

"Nope," Vic said, "actually that makes perfect sense." He extracted himself—Mac had let go of his hand a few seconds ago—and fetched the tissue box from Li Ann's bedside table. "Here."

She wiped her face and blew her nose a couple of times. "God," she said. "I feel wrung out."

"Lie down," Mac invited, patting the middle of the mattress. "It's your bed."

Li Ann lay down, and Mac lay down on her left. Li Ann caught Vic's eye, and patted the space to her right.

So he lay alongside her, not sure where this was going, but understanding that she wanted him there. He felt her thread her fingers though his own. He thought about lifting his head to check if she'd done the same with Mac on her other side, but then he realized that she probably _had_ , and it didn't matter.

"Remember Cambodia?" Li Ann said.

Vic had no Cambodia-related memories. The question wasn't directed at him.

"I was seventeen," Mac said.

"Michael taught us how to swim," Li Ann said.

Mac chuckled. "I was amazed. I kind of figured we'd both drown before he managed to teach us anything. He had no patience."

"Remember the turtle eggs I found?"

"He knew that they were endangered. He assigned a Tang soldier to watch over that damn nest day and night until they hatched and crawled into the river." Mac laughed again. "The only turtles in the world to be inducted from birth into a Triad gang, I guess."

"He wasn't all bad," Li Ann said quietly.

"No," Mac said, just as softly. "Nobody is."

After that, they were quiet, and after a while Vic realized that they'd both fallen asleep.

He thought about leaving—the bed was crowded for three, and the futon was entirely available—but Li Ann's fingers were still twined through his own.

He closed his eyes, and listened to them breathe.

If they were grieving over Michael, he couldn't understand it, and he couldn't share in it.

But he could be here for them—and apparently, they wanted him to be.

Vic realized, with some internal surprise, that he kept thinking _they_ —not just Li Ann.

He remembered Mac pulling him into the hug, and holding his hand.

Vic had to admit to himself that he cared how Mac was doing. That he worried about some of the darker hints Mac had made about his relationship with Michael, and how that might be affecting the way Mac was processing his grief.

That when Vic had run into the abandoned soy mill two nights ago, racing the bomb to pull Mac to safety at extreme risk to his own life, it had not been his professionalism that had driven him.

It had been a kind of love.


	6. Chapter 6

Vic woke up to the sound of frantic shouting.

He sat bolt upright, reaching for the gun which had been tucked uncomfortably under his shoulder the whole time he'd slept. Beside him, wide-eyed, Li Ann was doing the same.

The room was bright; they'd fallen asleep with the lights on. The curtain was still drawn over the balcony doors, undisturbed.

Mac—was gone.

Shit.

Vic was on his feet, gun in his hand, sweeping the room. No sign of an intruder.

Li Ann had gone up on her knees without leaving the bed, and now she was stuffing her gun back in its holster, looking down over the other side of the bed at the floor. "Mac?" she was saying.

From the floor on the other side of the bed came a stream of cranky-sounding Cantonese.

Vic re-holstered his gun as well, and walked around to the other side of the bed. "What the hell happened?" he said.

Mac was lying on the floor. "Fell out of bed," he said. "Don't everybody panic."

"Oh my God, Mac," Li Ann said, crawling down over the side of the bed to crouch next to him. "Don't move. Are you okay? Did you hit your head?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Mac said. "Just kinda rolled over the wrong way." He pushed himself up to a sitting position—and then kind of swayed a bit, and leaned heavily against the side of the bed. "Okay, little head rush," he said.

Li Ann touched his shoulder in a concerned way. "Dizzy?"

"Yeah."

She looked at Vic. "We've got to take him to the ER."

"No, seriously, I'm fine," Mac said. "Just give me a minute."

Li Ann shook her head. "You weren't dizzy earlier today. The doctor said that if you got worse again after getting better, we should take you to the ER."

"Really not necessary," Mac insisted. "I just need to lie down again."

"Back me up here," Li Ann said to Vic.

Vic's first impulse was to agree with Mac—if he said he was okay, he was probably okay. Li Ann was being paranoid. And the last thing any of them needed was a 2 a.m. trip to the ER and another sleepless night.

On the other hand, Mac _said_ he was okay, but he really didn't _look_ okay. He was pale, and noticeably unable to sit up without leaning against the bed.

Anyway, if there was nothing wrong, the ER doctor would just send them packing, no harm done except for the interrupted sleep. And it wasn't like any of them had work tomorrow.

"Yeah," Vic said. "We should go."

* * *

They left their guns behind, and made their slow way down to the parking garage, Mac leaning heavily on Vic with Li Ann steadying him from the other side.

Vic drove, and Li Ann sat in the back seat with Mac.

At one point, checking the rear view mirror, Vic thought he saw Li Ann giving Mac a tender kiss on the lips. But it was dark, and he wasn't sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him. The next time he glanced up into the mirror, Mac was leaning against the headrest with his eyes closed, and Li Ann was staring out the window.

Nevertheless, Vic felt a weary tightness in his gut. Really, it wouldn't be surprising if these events drove Mac and Li Ann back together. Earlier, when they'd been talking about Michael, the depth of their bond had been so evident.

Vic wouldn't be an asshole about it, he resolved. If that was what was happening, he would accept it with grace.

* * *

Mac had already passed through triage by the time Vic came in from parking the car. Vic was a little worried that he wouldn't be allowed to join Mac and Li Ann, considering his lack of a familial relationship, but due to either hospital policy or a sympathetic night shift—Vic didn't know which—he was directed straight to the curtained-off ER bed where Mac had been sent.

Possibly he had put his thumb on the scales a bit by referring to Mac as his 'partner' when he'd asked where to find him.

It was a mercifully quiet night in the ER, and the doctor arrived just after Vic.

"I remember you," the doctor said, opening up Mac's chart. "Two nights ago. Concussion with a small subdural hematoma. What brings you back here?"

"Overprotective friends," Mac said.

Li Ann glared at him. "He fell out of bed."

The doctor pulled out a penlight and shone it in each of Mac's eyes. "Did you have a sudden feeling of dizziness before you fell?"

"No, I was sleeping. I just rolled over the wrong way."

"But he was dizzy after he fell," Li Ann added.

Dr. Bakshi—that was his name, Vic remembered—put the pen light away. "Are you still dizzy?" he asked.

"A little," Mac admitted.

"Have you had any blurred or doubled vision? Nausea?"

Mac shook his head.

"Okay," the doctor said. "You seem all right, but considering your recent injury, I'm going to keep you here for a couple of hours just to make sure nothing changes. If you want to sleep, that's okay." He looked at Vic and Li Ann. "You can stay with him, but I'm afraid we can only allow one chair in the cubicle. The hospital cafeteria is open all night one floor up if you want to get coffee or something. I'll be back later to check on Mac, and hopefully discharge him."

With that, Dr. Bakshi left them.

"I told you guys," Mac said, "I'm fine."

"Well, 'fine' might be overstating it a bit," Vic said. "But anyway you don't seem to be immediately dying, which is nice. You should probably try to rest."

Mac didn't protest again, he just closed his eyes. He looked bone-tired.

Speaking of tired ... "Hey," Vic said to Li Ann. "Want some coffee?"

"I'd rather not leave Mac alone," she said.

"No, I mean I'll go get it. One milk, no sugar, right?"

She gave him a grateful look. "That's right. Thanks, Vic."

* * *

When Vic got back with a coffee in each hand about fifteen minutes later, Mac was apparently asleep on the bed, and Li Ann was nodding off in the chair.

Vic wouldn't have woken her, but she must have been awake enough to sense his arrival. She stood up, even though he tried to tell her that she didn't have to.

"I'd get a crick in my neck from talking to you, otherwise," she said with a faint smile, taking the coffee.

"Any change?" Vic asked.

She shook her head and sipped the coffee. "Honestly, we probably didn't need to come here."

Vic shrugged. "Better to be safe. Even the doctor wants to watch him for a couple of hours. You weren't crazy to worry."

She cracked a wry little smile at that. "Thanks," she said. "For backing me up."

"Always," Vic replied, automatically.

They stood there for a while, sipping their coffees. Vic watched Li Ann watching Mac.

"You care about him a lot," Vic said, quietly.

She nodded.

"Earlier, in the car..." Vic trailed off. He wasn't sure if he really wanted to bring it up.

"You saw me kiss him," Li Ann said, letting the words fall very softly. She didn't look at Vic, but kept gazing at Mac.

"Yeah," Vic said. "So, is that ... happening again, now?"

"Would you be angry?" she asked.

"No," he said. They were both talking very quietly. Vic looked over at Mac, wondering if he might be hearing them—but by the soft, slow sound of his breathing, he really did seem to be deeply asleep. "Sad, though. I can't promise not to be sad."

"Anyway, it's not," she said. "Not the way you think."

"I don't understand," Vic said.

She gave a little shrug. "That makes three of us."

"That was cryptic," Vic observed, and sipped his coffee to ease his feeling of total confusion.

"I love him," Li Ann said.

Vic just nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

"That doesn't mean I want to be his lover," she said.

The language, Vic reflected, was confusing. 'Love' was an important word but it had an awful lot of shades of meaning. "But you kissed him."

"I think..." Li Ann said, "that it's possible to want to kiss someone without wanting to have sex with them."

Vic raised an eyebrow. Oddly, it occurred to him that he didn't think he'd ever heard Li Ann directly refer to sex before, without elisions or euphemism. "And that's what's happening?"

She gave a little shrug of weak confirmation, and sipped her own coffee with a rueful look.

"And what about ... Mac?"

Li Ann gave a sharp little giggle, dribbling a little coffee from the corner of her mouth. "Oh, he wants to have sex with me," she said, quickly swiping her mouth clean with her wrist. "But he has self-control." She looked thoughtful. "Also he's been suffering from a serious concussion. So..." she shrugged again. "Actually, Vic, I have no idea what I'm doing."

Vic blinked, and felt the world shift sideways as he realized what was happening.

He was doing _girl talk_ with Li Ann.

About Mac.

Oh God.

"Um," he said carefully. "I'm getting the impression that you're not just talking about what happened in the car."

"No," she confirmed. "It's been happening for the past two days. Whatever it is. Since the first night."

"You've been kissing Mac."

She nodded.

Vic felt a bit weird about not having noticed, considering how they'd all been practically living in each others' laps—but then, he and Li Ann had been pretty much sleeping in shifts.

"And how is he taking it?"

Li Ann gave a helpless shrug. "We've talked. About what it isn't. I'm not sure what it _is_."

"Wow," Vic said. "Okay."

"Do you think I'm making a terrible mistake?" Li Ann asked.

Vic shook his head. "I really have no idea. You two have a complicated history, and the past two days haven't exactly been life-as-usual. I guess you might just have to wait and see how you feel about each other when things get back to normal."

After that they stood quietly for a while, finishing their coffees and stifling yawns. 

Vic really wasn't sure what to make of what Li Ann had just told him. Were she and Mac getting back together, or not? It sounded like _not_ , except how did the kissing fit in?

Eventually Li Ann settled in the chair and closed her eyes, mumbling something about how one of them might as well sit in it.

A while later, as Vic stood there nearly dozing off on his feet, Mac seemed to wake up a little—without opening his eyes, he said something that Vic didn't catch.

"What was that?" Vic said.

On the chair, Li Ann stirred and sat up.

Mac tossed his head back and forth—still without opening his eyes—and said something in a sort of frantic tone. Vic still couldn't make out the words, and he realized it sounded like Cantonese.

"Mac?" Li Ann said, coming to her feet with a very concerned look.

Suddenly Mac's whole body was in motion, limbs thrashing. Vic lunged forward to grab him before he could fall off the narrow bed—it had rails, but they weren't raised. On the other side of the bed, Li Ann had done the same.

Vic found that he needed a full two-handed grip to restrain Mac, who was yelling something incomprehensible now—eyes still closed.

"Jesus," Vic yelped, "Wake the hell up, Mac!"

Mac's eyes popped open just as an orderly in green scrubs ran into the cubicle.

"What's happening?" the orderly asked, halting just out of arm's reach of the bed.

Mac was wide-eyed and panting, looking from Vic to Li Ann to the orderly in a sort of wild confusion.

"Nightmare," Li Ann said. "I think."

"Do you want me to get a nurse?" the orderly asked.

"Mac?" Vic said. "Are you okay? Do you need a nurse?" He hadn't let go of Mac's arm yet—nor had Li Ann, on the other side.

Mac took a deep, shaky breath and shook his head. "Just a bad dream," he said.

The orderly left, apparently satisfied that there was no ongoing problem.

Vic let out a shaky chuckle and released Mac's arm. "Okay," he said. "I think I see how you fell out of bed."

Li Ann looked rather shaken, herself. "That sounded like a pretty bad nightmare," she said.

_I guess I woke up screaming sometimes,_ Vic suddenly remembered. Mac, explaining the Zoloft prescription.

"I thought the drugs were supposed to _help_ with that," Vic said, before his brain caught up to his mouth and he remembered—Mac had asked him _not_ to say anything to Li Ann.

Shit.

"What drugs?" Li Ann asked, with a puzzled glance at Vic.

Mac glared at Vic.

"Sorry," Vic held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "It slipped out. I'm really fucking tired."

"Just some pills the Director makes me take," Mac said. "Because of the nightmares."

"It doesn't seem like they're working very well," Vic said. Jesus, he'd never seen anyone gripped with such violence by a dream before.

"No, they help," Mac said. "I sleep through the night sometimes."

Vic processed the implication, with a quiet horror. Before Mac went on the drugs—he _didn't_ ever sleep through the night?

Fuuuck.

The last two days had already left Vic feeling like his entire understanding of Mac needed revision a couple of times over, but _this_ was going to take some processing on Vic's part.

Let's face it, Vic had always blithely assumed that Mac's insides matched his outside. Shallow, brash, immature, egotistical.

Now it occurred to Vic, for the first time, that Mac's more abrasive mannerisms might be deliberately cultivated—that Mac was maybe working hard to hide the fact that he was a little broken inside.

"The nightmare," Li Ann was saying, meanwhile. "I think you were back in Hong Kong. It sounded frightening. Do you remember what you were dreaming about?"

Mac shook his head. "Nah, I just remember waking up with Vic yelling at me and the two of you grabbing me." He gave a little uncomfortable laugh. "Hope I didn't say anything weird. It was just a dream, right?"

"Right," Li Ann said, still looking distinctly uneasy. "All right then."

Vic, meanwhile, felt a niggling suspicion that maybe Mac was lying about not remembering because he didn't want Li Ann to worry. He resolved to ask Mac about it sometime later, when they were alone.

* * *

Dr. Bakshi came back just a few minutes later. After checking Mac over one more time, he cleared him to go home.

On the drive back, everyone was pretty quiet. Li Ann took the wheel, and Mac sat in the front passenger side.

Vic had some time to think about the things he'd recently learned about Mac.

His secret relationship with Michael. The nightmares he didn't want to talk about.

Another recent memory floated to the surface—that moment in the abandoned soy mill two nights ago when Vic had found Mac collapsed under the light fixture.

Mac had warned him about the bomb, and told him to get out.

Mac had been willing to die to save Vic. Not just hypothetically willing—he'd _made_ the choice, he'd told Vic to run even though he couldn't follow. It was Vic and Li Ann who'd overruled him.

Vic felt that realization settling heavily somewhere down in his gut.

Self-sacrifice wasn't a concept he associated with Mac—but maybe he just hadn't been watching closely enough.

So, that suggested a plan. A way forward. Vic would watch Mac more closely. Try to start seeing him for who he really was. And if Mac needed some help sometimes—and Jesus, it really seemed like he did—Vic could try to be there to give it.

* * *

Back at Li Ann's apartment, they faced the bed problem.

"We can't risk Mac falling out again," Vic pointed out, as they all gazed doubtfully at Li Ann's bed.

"He'll probably be okay on his own in the centre of the bed," Li Ann said, but she sounded uncertain. "Earlier, with all three of us—we crowded him off. That was my fault."

"What? No, Li Ann, don't blame yourself for that. I fall out of bed all the time at home," Mac said.

Li Ann gave him a strange look. "You what?"

Mac shrugged. "I'm a restless sleeper. I fall out of bed. I climb back in. It's not that weird. Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Could we just take the mattress off, put it on the floor?" Vic suggested.

Li Ann shook her head. "No, look, there isn't room. We'd have to take the frame apart."

"Well, we could," Vic said, not very enthusiastically—it was four-thirty in the morning, and they were all exhausted. Not really the time to be pulling out the toolboxes.

Li Ann straightened up suddenly, looking decisive. "Mac in the middle," she said. "All three of us on the bed, like before, but Mac in the middle."

"Sure," Vic agreed quickly—at least it was a solution that got them all back to sleep in the minimum possible time. "I'm cool with that."

"Fine," Mac shrugged, and climbed into the bed.

This time, Li Ann and Vic took the time to put on their pyjamas and turn out the lights.

"No cuddling," Vic felt the need to specify as he climbed into bed on one side of Mac, and pulled the covers up over his chest.

Beside him, he heard Mac give a little snort of laughter.

"Good night," Li Ann said from Mac's other side.


	7. Chapter 7

Vic drifted awake feeling unusually well-rested and relaxed. The quality of the light peeking around the edges of Li Ann's curtains suggested that it was late morning already.

The next thing that Vic realized was that Mac was snuggled tight up against him.

Vic experienced a sharp little burst of adrenaline, bringing him fully awake with a quickened heartbeat.

" _No cuddling_ ," he whispered faintly, in useless protest. Everyone else in the bed was still fast asleep.

Okay; _Mac_ was asleep, so it was pointless to be mad at him. The guy had probably just rolled over in his sleep.

And it wasn't _really_ a cuddle—no part of Mac's body was draped over any part of Vic's. Mac was simply glued down the whole length of Vic's body, with his face tucked in against Vic's neck and his slow, sleepy breaths tickling Vic's skin.

Time to get up.

Vic eased himself out of the bed, managing not to disturb Mac—or Li Ann, for that matter, who was curled up facing away from Mac on the other edge of the mattress.

At least Mac had apparently made it through the rest of the night without any more violent nightmares.

Remembering why they'd all been sleeping together in the first place, Vic gave a thoughtful glance to the space he'd just vacated. Now there was no barrier between Mac and the edge of the bed. Was that a problem?

After a moment's contemplation, Vic decided it was probably fine. If Mac started yelling and thrashing again, Vic would make it back in time to grab him. It was only a one-bedroom apartment, after all; Vic would never be more than a few steps away.

* * *

By the time Li Ann emerged from the bedroom, pushing her hair back from her sleep-puffy face, Vic had had some cereal and solved the bed problem.

"The futon," he said, pointing. "We can move Mac out here." Vic had already set the futon mattress flat on the living room floor, and tucked the frame away in a corner. The futon frame was light, and was made to fold up. They could have easily done it last night if they'd thought of it.

"Good idea," Li Ann said. She glanced towards the bedroom. "Should we move him now?"

"I think it can wait till he wakes up. As long as we're close, we'll hear if he starts moving around."

Li Ann nodded, and moved into the kitchen to make herself some tea. Vic, sitting at the dining table, could still see her through the pass-through.

"How are you doing?" Vic asked her.

"All right," she said, without elaborating. "Would you like some tea?"

"Sure, why not," Vic said. "Hey, I'd like to go back to my place today to get more clothes. Do you think you could drive me there, so I can pick up my truck, too?"

"I don't think we should be leaving Mac alone, yet," Li Ann said, coming out and around to the table with her teapot and two cups on a red lacquer tray. "Especially with Paul still out there somewhere."

"Okay, sure," Vic said, "I guess I can take a cab."

Li Ann set a cup in front of each of them, and poured the tea. 

It was a green tea, and the cups were the little Asian-style ones with no handles. Vic always felt absurdly delicate drinking out of them. He picked his up carefully with his fingertips, and blew over the surface of the tea to cool it. "You're really still worried about Paul?"

"I think that there's a very good chance that he'll try to kill us if he figures out where to find us," she said.

Vic sipped his tea. It was a bit hard for him to take this guy seriously as a threat, when he'd never even met him. But Li Ann and Mac weren't the type to jump at shadows. "Okay," he said. "Until you're satisfied it's safe, Mac doesn't get left alone—and neither do you."

* * *

Vic headed off after lunch to pick up his clothes and truck, as well as some groceries. When he got back, Li Ann and Mac were both in the living room. Li Ann was practising a sequence of martial arts moves in slow motion in the empty half of the room, and Mac was sitting cross-legged on the futon mattress, which was still flat on the floor.

"Hey, you're up!" Vic said to Mac, as he headed into the kitchen with the groceries. "How are you feeling?"

"Don't talk to me," Mac said. "I'm meditating."

"Um, okay." Vic put the eggs, bacon, and fruit in the fridge, and the bread on the counter. Then he went out into the living room.

Li Ann was spinning slowly, lifting one leg to snap a kick at an invisible opponent's head. She was barefoot, wearing black karate-style pants and a green tank top. Vic could see the tense muscles in her arms and neck. From the light sheen of sweat on her forehead, he guessed she'd been at it for a while.

For a lack of other places to sit, Vic settled on the futon next to Mac. "Been up long?" he asked.

"Shut up, Vic," Mac said. His eyes were half-closed; he didn't turn towards Vic.

"Geez, don't take my head off. I was just being polite. Isn't meditation supposed to relax you?"

"It's not supposed to relax me," Mac said, still without looking at Vic. He sounded irritated. "It's supposed to enlighten me."

"Mac is bad at meditation," Li Ann commented archly without pausing in her sequence of moves. Now she was smoothly driving her elbow into the bridge of the poor invisible guy's nose. "He suffers from some pretty extreme monkey-mind."

"Ook ook?" Vic said, grinning at Mac. "I always knew that Li Ann would come to recognize your simian qualities eventually."

Mac made an exasperated noise and opened his eyes enough to roll them. "It's a technical term. It means your thoughts are jumping around. It's _perfectly normal_."

"For _beginners_ ," Li Ann editorialized. She gave a little hop and kicked twice in the air.

Vic looked curiously at Li Ann. "I've never seen you meditate."

"Oh, snap," Mac said under his breath, smirking.

She made her hands into knife-shapes, and did some sort of fancy block thing. "I didn't keep it up."

"Hey," Mac said, turning to Vic, "Wanna try?"

"Try what?"

"Meditating."

Vic shook his head, bemused. "I'm not really into any of that New-Age stuff."

Li Ann snorted, and had to restart the move she'd been doing. "Buddhism is half a millennium older than Christianity, Vic. It's not exactly New-Age."

"Mac isn't Buddhist," Vic scoffed. And then immediately wondered if he'd put his foot in his mouth. He'd been enjoying settling back into the comfortable groove of teasing Mac—everything had felt very _normal_ for a few minutes there—but he knew that Mac and Li Ann were still raw from the godfather's and Michael's deaths. "Shit, sorry, _are_ you?" he said. "Were the Tangs Buddhist?"

Mac let out an abrupt little laugh. "The godfather wasn't exactly religious."

"We went to the temple on Buddha's birthday," Li Ann said. "Like everybody else."

"That's a thing?" Vic said.

"We had this one tutor," Mac said. "A Tibetan Buddhist monk."

"Ex-monk," Li Ann corrected him. She made a motion like she was grabbing somebody by the shoulders and then kneeing them in the face.

"The godfather wanted you to learn how to meditate?"

Mac looked amused. "Sifu Jinpa was supposed to teach us maths. He made us meditate when we got on his nerves."

"Which in your case was a lot," Li Ann added, punching the air twice.

"He didn't last very long," Mac added.

"Six months, maybe?" Li Ann said.

Mac nodded. "I think the godfather got wind that he'd started teaching us about non-violence."

Vic laughed a little at that—until it occurred to him that it might not have been a joke. "So why are you meditating _now_?" he asked.

Mac grimaced. "It is literally the only thing I can do. I can't move around, I can't read, I can't watch TV—"

"I don't even have a TV," Li Ann pointed out.

"I am soooo bored," Mac moaned.

So, here they were—the dreaded moment when Mac's boredom got worse than his pain, and Vic and Li Ann had to switch modes from nurse to babysitter.

"Okay, I'll try it," Vic said.

Mac blinked. "Try what?"

"Meditation," Vic said. Mac had a point about his lack of other options, and with Li Ann still fiercely concentrating on her combat practice, Vic figured it was up to him to help stop Mac from going stir-crazy.

"Okay," Mac said, brightening. "You gotta sit up straighter. Like this."

Vic copied Mac's pose, crossing his legs and straightening his back. "What about my hands?"

"You can rest them on your knees. Just be comfortable."

"Okay, now what?"

"Rest your gaze just a little bit in front of you. Now ... notice your breath."

"And?"

Mac smirked. "That's all. Just pay attention to your breathing."

"You're going to have thoughts," Li Ann added from across the room. "Just let them go and return to your breath."

"Um, okay," Vic said.

He'd thought it was going to be a lot more complicated and mystical than this. This actually seemed utterly mundane.

He was breathing in. Woohoo.

Breathing out. Yup, he sure did know how to breathe.

Mac was lucky to still be breathing after Michael's betrayal. They all were. Jesus, if they'd been five seconds slower getting out of that soy mill—

"Have your thoughts wandered?" Mac asked.

"What?" Vic said with a guilty start. "No!"

Mac grinned without quite opening his eyes. "Yes they have. Bring them back to your breath."

Okay. Vic was going to do this right.

Breathing in.

He'd planned to start watching Mac more closely, to try seeing him for who he really was. Was this a puzzle piece—meditation techniques from a Tibetan math teacher?

Shit, that was a wandering thought again.

Breathing out.

Li Ann and Mac didn't talk about their past very much, at least not around Vic. He supposed he'd actively discouraged them back in the beginning, because he'd been jealous of their bond—especially while Vic was still engaged to Li Ann, and feeling Mac nipping at his heels.

Wait, he wasn't supposed to be thinking right now.

Breathing in.

Li Ann had never liked talking about her past even before Mac had come back from the dead. Well, when she'd been mourning Mac, it had probably been painful to think about.

Honestly, Vic had learned more about Li Ann and Mac's pre-Agency lives in the past three days than he had in the past year and a half.

And yet he still hardly knew anything.

Why did Mac wake up screaming?

Vic realized he'd gone all tense, and he'd forgotten whether he was supposed to be breathing in or breathing out.

"Jesus," Vic puffed out. "How long have we been meditating?"

"About thirty seconds," Li Ann said.

"No," Vic said. "That was at least ten minutes."

Mac gave Vic a gleeful look. "Monkey mind, much?"

Vic let himself laugh. "You win, man. It's a lot fucking harder than it looks."

* * *

After the meditation session, Mac was tired; he curled up on the futon for a nap. Li Ann finished her workout and went to take a shower; Vic read a book. He was enjoying the latest John Grisham thriller. When Li Ann had seen what he was reading, she'd teased him about taking his work home with him. But Vic found the books a pleasant escape from his own life—ultimately, the plots made sense, the good guys won, and Vic was in no danger of getting shot.

The rest of the day passed quietly. Mac woke up; Vic made himself available for idle chit-chat, to help stave off Mac's boredom. Li Ann hid in her room doing Sudoku. For supper, she ordered them Chinese food again.

As bedtime approached, at a moment when they were all together in the living room, Mac asked "Is Vic sleeping over again?"

"Yeah," Vic said, "I'm here all week."

"Okay," Mac said. "You should sleep out here with me. Let Li Ann have her bed to herself again."

Vic wasn't quite sure how to respond to that. He hadn't thought about this night's sleeping arrangements yet—so far they'd been muddling through each night in a different way—but for Mac to jump straight to keeping Li Ann and Vic apart had shades of the old rivalry, which Vic had thought they were done with.

Anyway, weren't _Mac_ and _Li Ann_ sort of ambiguously back together now, what with the sneaking around and the secret kisses?

Actually Mac might not know that Li Ann had talked to Vic about that, Vic realized. Maybe Mac thought it was still a secret.

Come to think of it, why hadn't Mac invited _Li Ann_ to sleep out on the futon with him?

"Thanks," Li Ann was saying, meanwhile, looking profoundly grateful. "I could really use a bit of privacy."

_Oh_ , Vic realized. 'Let Li Ann have her bed to herself again' wasn't code for 'hands off my woman, you knave!'—it was code for 'Li Ann has clearly had enough of us constantly breathing down her neck'.

Vic felt a bit sheepish that Mac had noticed first. Upon reflection, Li Ann had been distancing herself from them today, to the extent that that was possible in a one-bedroom apartment with three people in it.

Speaking of early warning signs that Vic had missed....

Vic remembered suddenly that even when he and Li Ann had been engaged, she'd never wanted to spend the night together twice in a row.

"Okay, sure," he agreed—belatedly, since Mac and Li Ann seemed to have already assigned him his place. "I'll bunk with Mac."

* * *

This time Vic felt like a kid getting ready for a sleep-over. He brushed his teeth, put on his pyjamas, and padded into the living room. Mac was already stretched out on one side of the futon; the covers were folded down invitingly on the other side.

"Yay," Mac said, giving Vic an impish grin. "Alone with you at last."

"Uh," Vic stuttered, hesitating on the brink of climbing in.

Earlier, when his thoughts about sleeping arrangements had gone immediately in the direction of the rivalry over Li Ann, he had completely forgotten about the fact that Mac was _gay_ , and had a _crush_ on Vic.

Shit.

Mac obviously noticed Vic's hesitation. His grin faded. "I was just teasing, Vic, no need to clutch your pearls. I'm not going to jump you in the middle of the night. Funny little thing; I want my partners to be _into_ me."

"You kissed me," Vic pointed out. "The first night."

He hadn't planned on bringing that up, and he certainly hadn't planned on his voice coming out in such a squeak.

Mac bit his lip, looking suddenly so hangdog and guilty that Vic felt a reflexive impulse—quickly suppressed—to give him a comforting hug. "Sorry," Mac said. "I literally wasn't in my right mind, you know."

"I know," Vic admitted. "Li Ann talked to me about it."

"You don't have to stay," Mac said. "I'm feeling a lot better, even compared to this morning. I'll be fine. You could sleep at home, come back tomorrow."

Vic looked at him. "Do you _want_ me to go?" he asked, carefully.

It was not inconceivable that Mac, like Li Ann, would be craving some privacy.

Vic himself didn't feel an urge to go home, not really. To be honest, despite the circumstances, he was enjoying the company—compared to his usual lonely existence, it was a nice change—but maybe Mac was feeling trapped.

"No," Mac said. "I'd rather you stayed." He sounded unusually tentative. "Um. I was sort of hoping—if you're sleeping next to me—if I start having one of those dreams—could you try to wake me up before I wake up Li Ann?"

Oh. Shit. _That_. Vic suddenly felt like an asshole for all of the wrong conclusions he'd leapt to. 

"She was there when you had the nightmare in the ER," Vic pointed out. 

"Sure," Mac said. "But I'd rather not have another one in front of her."

"Okay," Vic said. "I get it, I guess. I'll wake you up if anything happens."

* * *

No matter how much he'd been expecting it, it was still a shock to be woken from a deep sleep by Mac suddenly yelling something in frightened Cantonese.

Vic rolled out of the way of Mac's flailing hands, and came to his knees on the mattress. "Mac!" he said, urgently. He knew that Mac hadn't wanted to wake Li Ann up, and even though her bedroom door was closed, Vic couldn't imagine she'd sleep through much more of this. "Wake up!" He tried to grab Mac's arm, and succeeded on the second attempt. He held firm against Mac's thrashing, repeating "Wake _up_!"

Mac's eyes popped open, and instead of flailing randomly he was suddenly grabbing Vic in return and pulling him off balance, trying to pin him.

Vic's reflexes took over for a moment—he continued the roll, got out from under Mac, drew his fist back—and then his brain caught up. He froze.

He _really_ couldn't hit Mac.

Mac, unfortunately, hadn't yet drawn the same conclusion. Next thing Vic knew, a hard kick to his side sent him skidding across the bed.

"Dammit, Mac," he groaned.

" _Vic_?"

"Yeah," Vic gasped, clutching his side.

"What are you doing here?"

"Uh, you asked me to sleep next to you. And wake you up if you had a nightmare."

"We're in _Toronto_ ," Mac said, like he'd just figured out something important.

"We sure are," Vic said faintly, poking his side. He didn't think anything was broken.

The room was pretty dim, but there was enough light for Vic to see Mac sitting back down on the futon, and then curling up with his arms around his legs and his forehead pressed against his knees.

"At least you didn't kiss me this time," Vic said.

Mac didn't say anything.

Vic crawled a little closer to him, about to ask if he was okay, and then he noticed that Mac seemed to be shivering.

"Uh, are you cold?" Vic said. It didn't seem likely—Li Ann kept her apartment pretty warm, even at night—but actually now Vic could definitely hear Mac's teeth chattering. "Hey, uh," he tentatively put a hand on Mac's shoulder, "Maybe you should get back under the blankets."

Mac shrugged off Vic's hand with a sharp twitch. "Fuck off," he snarled, without uncurling. The thickness of his voice, and a quick sniffle that followed the words, suggested that he was crying.

Vic backed away cautiously, but he didn't leave the bed.

Okay, Mac was _freaking out_.

Vic ran down a quick mental checklist of the things the ER doctor had said to watch out for. Mac wasn't incoherent, or dizzy, or puking. So this probably wasn't a concussion thing.

Something about the dream, then. 

Vic held his position, crouching just out of arm's length from Mac, feeling increasingly out of his depth.

Mac was still curled up tight. Vic could still see him shivering, could hear the occasional quick, unsteady breaths as Mac clearly fought—successfully—to keep his weeping silent.

It went on for a long time. Like, ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.

Vic started to worry about the concussion again. This couldn't be good for Mac. He wasn't even really supposed to be sitting up for any length of time.

"I'm going to get Li Ann," Vic whispered finally.

"No!" Mac said immediately. At least it was a reaction.

"You really clearly need somebody you can talk to right now," Vic said, but he didn't move yet. "That's obviously not me."

"Not her either," Mac said.

"Why not? She cares about you. A lot."

Mac shook his head and hugged his knees tighter. "I won't put this on her. She doesn't need it."

"Is that what she'd say, if you let her know about this?"

Mac sniffed and seemed to pull himself together a little. He lifted his head, to look at Vic. "Do you know how she ended up with the Tangs?" he asked.

"No," Vic said, confused by the out-of-nowhere question. "Why?"

Mac nodded. "Never mind."

"Wait, what?" Vic said. "How _did_ she, then?"

Mac just shook his head again. "It's her business if she ever wants to tell you."

It had never occurred to Vic to ask how Li Ann had joined the Tangs, but now he wondered what he was missing. The context, and Mac's refusal to elaborate, suggested that there was some dark secret there, which worried Vic.

And come to think of it ... "Well, how did _you_ end up with the Tangs?" Vic asked.

Mac uncurled, finally, and swiped his cheeks dry with the heel of his hand. "That's not a kid-appropriate story," he said. "I don't want to destroy your innocence."

Vic snorted. "What innocence?" Despite his concern for Mac, a bit of annoyance crept in. "Hello, I was a cop. I worked _Vice_."

"Okay, okay," Mac said, "You're hard-boiled. Got it. Still not gonna talk about it with you. We don't have that kind of a relationship."

"But you do ... with Li Ann?" Vic probed, feeling around for the edges of this silence.

Mac let out a sharp little laugh. "No. Not with her, either."

"Okay, is there anyone you _do_ have that kind of a relationship with?" Vic asked. Not that he could think of any potential candidates, but hey, maybe Mac had secret heart-to-heart talks with the Cleaners. Vic could only hope.

Mac hesitated for a long moment before he answered, "Michael."

Well, shit.

And before Vic could say anything, Mac had crawled back under the covers and laid down with his back to Vic. Which was a clear _I don't want to talk about it_ sign if there ever was one.

Vic briefly considered saying something anyway, but decided against it. The nightmare was over, Mac had stopped freaking out, and he needed the rest.

That didn't stop Vic's mind from worrying at it, as he lay down beside Mac.

Okay, it had never occurred to him to wonder how Li Ann and Mac had ended up with the Tangs. The fact that they _had_ was just a part of their background, and besides—as he'd already reflected earlier that day—it's not like either of them talked very much at all about their pre-Agency lives.

He knew that they'd both been adopted, obviously. If he'd thought about it at all, he'd vaguely assumed that the godfather had pulled them both out of some Hong Kong orphanage.

But come to think of it, how could Mac possibly have been in a Hong Kong orphanage? His biological father was alive and well. He'd breezed through town just a few months ago.

Okay, so that was a mystery. And Vic, in his heart, was still a detective. Unfortunately, interrogating Mac or Li Ann was off the table, and Vic didn't have any other leads to follow—except maybe for asking the Director, and he didn't want to go there.

So—it was gonna be a stake-out. Metaphorically speaking. At some point, surely, Mac would want to open up a bit. And Vic would be there.

* * *

Vic drifted slowly towards wakefulness, feeling exceptionally warm and comfortable. At first he didn't feel any need to wake up all the way; the light coming through his closed eyelids told him it was morning, but he had nowhere to go, no reason to get up. He was sleepy and comfy.

Then he woke up a little more, and his thinking brain engaged, and he realized that he was trapped. Something heavy was wrapped around his chest, and likewise his ankles, pinning him down.

About ten different possibilities flicked through his mind, each involving a former enemy and each more dire than the last, in the half-second it took him to open his eyes and take in the _actual_ situation—which turned out to be no comfort at all.

Mac was spooning Vic.

The weight across Vic's chest was Mac's arm, and Mac's legs were all tangled up with Vic's.

Vic managed to take a deep breath and count to three, to force himself to think before reacting.

Mac was asleep.

And Vic knew—God did he know—that Mac was a restless sleeper.

Okay, so at some point in the night Mac had accidentally rolled over in his sleep and wrapped himself octopus-style around Vic. No harm, no foul. If Vic could just extricate himself before Mac woke up, Mac probably wouldn't even know it had happened.

The only problem with that plan? When Vic tried to ease himself out of Mac's embrace, Mac just held on tighter.

Jesus, was he awake after all?

"Mac," Vic whispered, trying again to squirm free. "Fucking let go of me."

Mac murmured something unintelligible and nuzzled the back of Vic's neck.

Okay, that was a bridge too far. Vic grabbed Mac's arm with real force this time and shoved it off of himself, finally getting free so he could roll off the futon and come to his knees facing Mac. "Jesus, Mac, what the hell?!"

Mac blinked at Vic. "What just happened?"

"You tell me." Vic could feel a flush rising on his neck and cheeks. This was _not_ a great start to the morning. "When I woke up you were _cuddling_ me."

Mac's expression passed quickly from confusion to dismay, before he managed to pull up an uncomfortable grin. "Oops. Sorry."

"Sorry?" Vic repeated, incredulously. " _Why_ were you cuddling me? That is not a thing that we do, Mac."

"Well, I don't remember," Mac said. "I was asleep."

"Oh, and is that _normal_ for you? Do you always cuddle people in your sleep?" Vic snapped.

"I don't know," Mac said. "I've never really slept with anyone before."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Vic said, not letting go of his righteous indignation. "Of course you have."

"Li Ann never wanted me to spend the night," Mac said. "Neither did Michael."

Vic finally realized that Mac was serious. "Are you trying to tell me that you have literally never spent the night in bed with someone?"

"Well, once," Mac conceded. "With Claire."

"The arms dealer," Vic recalled. He frowned, remembering. "You tried to marry her the next fucking day."

"Would have, too, if she hadn't brought a nuclear bomb to the wedding...." Mac sounded a little wistful.

"Didn't you ever have—I mean, Li Ann mentioned that you had other lovers, back in Hong Kong. Besides her and, um, Michael."

"Sure, once in a while," Mac said. "But nobody I went home with."

"Huh?" Vic said. "But then how did you—"

Mac rolled his eyes. "Didn't you say you worked Vice? Think nightclubs. Men's rooms."

"Oh, geez." Vic groaned. "Now I need to bleach my brain."

Mac did a little smirk and shrug combo, and Vic wondered how the hell he'd just let Mac get the upper hand. Besides, they weren't really talking about Mac's sordid sexual history, they were talking about—"Okay, but seriously, man, you can't _cuddle_ me. I don't swing that way."

"I didn't do it on purpose. I don't even remember doing it." Mac looked troubled now. "I guess you're not going to want to sleep next to me again."

Oh, well, that was definitely a question. "I'm not sure," Vic said, honestly. "Last night—that was a hell of a nightmare you had. You, uh, scared me a bit."

"I am so sorry I kicked you," Mac said, looking pretty abject. "You were grabbing me, I didn't realize it was you—"

"Oh, yeah, that," Vic said. His side was still tender. He reflexively hitched up the bottom of the old Glass Tiger t-shirt he'd been using for sleepwear, and saw a bloom of purple bruise in the place where Mac's foot had made contact. Then he saw Mac's appalled expression. Vic quickly tugged the shirt back down. "No, don't worry about that," Vic said. "I've had worse from training." It was true—Jackie hit _hard_. "I meant, I was scared for _you_." At that, Mac tensed visibly. Vic watched him carefully as he continued. "After you woke up, you really seemed to go down a rabbit hole. For a while I wasn't sure if you were gonna come out of it."

Mac gave a shaky little shrug, like he was trying to be flippant but his body wasn't in on it. "Last night was a pretty bad one. They're not usually that bad."

Vic frowned. "Maybe it _wasn't_ a great idea to have me sleeping there next to you. I mean, if I made it worse—"

"No, that's not it," Mac said quickly. "I mean, the bad ones come ... sometimes. Once or twice a week. It wasn't you."

Jesus. Vic tried to wrap his head around that information. "Weren't the pills supposed to be helping with that?"

"They do," Mac said. "Before the pills it was once or twice a night."

Okay, fuck. Mac was _not_ okay. "What do you dream about?" Vic asked, pretend-casual.

Mac just shook his head. "Not going there," he said. "It doesn't matter. I'll be back on my own on the 24th, hopefully. Just—will you please help me keep Li Ann out of this in the meantime?"

Vic hesitated, thinking about what that would mean.

Deceiving Li Ann, or at least actively hiding things from her. Subjecting himself to more middle-of-the-night wakings, possibly getting kicked or punched again by a flailing, semi-conscious Mac—though Vic thought he could probably do a better job of avoiding that next time—and, let's not forget, a strong possibility of more involuntary cuddles.

Also, even if Vic was willing to go through all that, was it a good idea? He'd just be helping Mac hide the extent to which he was, fuck, the extent to which he was _suffering_. Those nightmares were coming from somewhere. And Mac wasn't talking to anybody about them, and Vic had a hunch that when you swept that kind of thing under the rug, it didn't just go away.

Wait, though. The Director knew. And the Agency doctor's name had been on the prescription bottle. "Are you getting therapy?" Vic asked.

"Huh?" Mac said. "What? Fuck off, Vic, I'm not _crazy_. I just have bad dreams."

Okay, so much for that idea.

Mac seemed to think that all he needed help with was keeping his night-time yelling muffled for the next three nights so that Li Ann wouldn't notice. And he hadn't ever exactly explained why he didn't want Li Ann involved, but he'd dropped some worrying hints. 

The gist of it was that the past was a minefield, for both Li Ann and Mac—and maybe for now, until he was more sure of the ground, Vic had better tread really damn lightly.

"Okay," he said finally. "I'll sleep out here with you as long as you're staying at Li Ann's place. I'll wake you up if you have those dreams again."

"Thanks, Vic," Mac said with a look of profound relief.

Vic just really wished that he could be sure he was doing the right thing.


	8. Chapter 8

On the afternoon of the 23rd, Li Ann and the guys were passing the time quietly when the phone rang. Vic was reading, Mac was trying to meditate again, and Li Ann had been putting away clean dishes.

"Hello?" she said, tucking the receiver between her shoulder and ear so that she could pick up a stack of plates.

"Hey there, Tsei." It was Dobrinsky. There was a weirdly forced joviality to his tone. "I need you and Mac to come down to the Agency this afternoon."

"Huh?" Li Ann said. "Mac's appointment isn't until tomorrow morning."

"My cars need washing," Dobrinsky said. "I know Mac would be offended if anybody else did it, it's his special thing."

Li Ann was about to protest in confusion, but then she suddenly realized—this was a _very_ weird call. "Okay," she said carefully, listening hard for any background noises on the other end. "Do you want us to bring anything special?"

"Just your sweet selves," Dobrinsky said. "And hop to it, I want you here in twenty minutes."

Click; dial tone.

"Shit," Li Ann said, putting down the plates and hanging up the phone.

"What was that?" Vic asked, looking up from his book.

"Dobrinsky wants us at the Agency," Li Ann said casually, while she ripped a page from her phone-message pad and scrawled quickly: _Gun to his head_. She held the note up, and Vic's eyes went wide.

_Are you sure?_ Vic mouthed silently, meanwhile nudging Mac to get his attention, and nodding towards Li Ann's note.

_Just a hunch,_ Li Ann wrote.

The notes might have been overkill, honestly. But she knew the Director bugged their places sometimes, and if the Agency was compromised now....

"I guess we'd better go, then," Vic said out loud, reaching for his gun.

Mac stood up.

"Not _you_ ," Li Ann said.

"Like hell," Mac said. He grabbed the paper and pencil from Li Ann and wrote **PAUL** , all in capital letters with three underlines and an exclamation mark.

"You're not even supposed to be _writing_ yet," Vic pointed out, taking the paper and pencil away from Mac. "Let alone ... working."

"I've felt fine for days," Mac said. "I'm getting the all-clear tomorrow."

"You _might_ get the all-clear," Li Ann said, giving her gun one last check before holstering it. "Until then you're off duty."

Mac looked frustrated, but Li Ann steeled herself. Mac _said_ he'd been fine for days, but she'd seen him wincing from a headache yesterday when he'd thought she wasn't looking. Whatever was going on at the Agency, she and Vic would handle it, and Mac would have to accept being sidelined—the risk of him getting re-injured was just too great.

* * *

They took Li Ann's car to the Agency, since it was more discreet than Vic's giant red pick-up truck. They weren't sure what they'd find when they got there, and they approached with caution, guns drawn.

The front door was locked and the security code was working as usual. Inside, there was a note scrawled in red pen on loose-leaf, taped to the concrete wall right in front of the door. _Come to the briefing room!_ it said in Jackie's handwriting. _Everything is fine!_

Vic nodded down the hall towards the briefing room. "Cover me," he whispered.

They proceeded cautiously down the hall. The scuffs of their footsteps echoed hugely. There was no sign of other life.

They stopped outside the door of the briefing room. Vic did a _three, two, one_ with raised fingers, and then they burst through the door together, guns first.

"Freeze!" Vic yelled as they entered. "Nobody move! Hands up!"

Nobody moved, but nobody put their hands up, either.

Jackie and Dobrinsky were duct-taped to two of the rolling chairs. Their mouths were taped, too.

Paul was standing between them. The gun in his right hand was pointing steadily at Jackie's head. In his left hand, he was holding some kind of spring-loaded lever.

"Ah, hi," Vic said, pointing his gun. "You must be Paul."

"I have no idea who you are, and I don't care," Paul said. He looked at Li Ann and said in Cantonese, "Where's Mac?"

"He's coming in the back way," Li Ann said, in English. Her heart was racing, but she kept her voice cool. "We've got you surrounded and outnumbered. If you surrender now we won't hurt you."

"Ha," said Paul. "There's no other entrance, I checked." Then he switched to English. "You two had better lower your guns right now. I have two hostages, and I only need one."

"Eh," Li Ann said, keeping her aim steady on the centre of Paul's head—"I never liked Jackie that much anyway."

Jackie gave an outraged squeak.

Paul raised his left hand, the one with the lever. "I'm serious. You two had better drop your guns. I found Pucci's leftovers."

"Oh, shit," Vic said under his breath. His gun lowered fractionally.

"What is it?" Li Ann asked.

"Dead man switch," Vic said. "Activates if he lets go of it." He called out to Paul, "Where's the bomb?"

"Ceiling," Paul said.

"That'll kill you as surely as us," Li Ann pointed out.

"Sure," Paul said. "But maybe you've got more to lose. So you've got till the count of three to lower your guns or I shoot the blonde one. Three ... two ..."

Li Ann lowered her gun carefully to the floor, keeping her free hand open in plain sight. To her left, Vic did the same.

"Now kick them away," Paul said.

They did so. Paul hadn't instructed them to kick the guns towards _him_ , so Li Ann kicked hers to the far corner of the room, and she saw Vic doing the same on the opposite side.

"Better," Paul said. "Now where's Mac?"

"At home," Vic said. "On bed rest. Michael nearly killed him."

As Vic talked, Li Ann was scanning the room as best she could without making any sudden moves. There had to be a way out of this, but she couldn't see it yet.

"Then who killed Michael?" Paul said. The gun pointing at Jackie shook a little.

Li Ann took a half step forward. "I did," she said.

"Li Ann, no!" she heard Vic whispering frantically behind her. She ignored him.

"I'm the one you want," she said steadily, raising both hands, palms front. "Let the rest of them go." Another half step.

She wasn't planning any kind of dramatic self-sacrifice, not really. She just thought this might be her best chance of getting close enough to disarm him.

"Don't come any closer!" Paul said sharply. "Why the hell would I let them go?"

Li Ann switched to Cantonese. "I know you loved Michael," she said. "I did too. So did Mac."

"Mac _betrayed_ him," Paul said, following her lead in the language. "You _killed_ him. You have nothing to say to me." His gun swung around from Jackie to point at Li Ann's chest instead, which was not a great improvement from Li Ann's point of view. She wished she'd had time to stop by the armoury and get a Kevlar vest.

"Whatever you're doing," Vic whispered, "Stop it!"

Li Ann ignored Vic. "You're suffering," she said to Paul. "I get that. Loving Michael wasn't like loving an ordinary person. Now that he's gone, you feel like there's a black hole where the sun used to be."

Paul shook his head. "You left him."

"He was too much for me," Li Ann said. "For Mac, too. Michael needed _you_ , he needed someone who could withstand him."

The gun pointing at Li Ann's chest was visibly shaking now. "What the hell do you know about that," Paul whispered, and there were tears in his eyes.

To be honest, Li Ann didn't know nearly as much as she was implying. She was going mostly off of hints that Mac had dropped, largely while drunk. Her own relationship with Michael, back in Hong Kong, had been a lot more tame, and distant. She'd been his sister, but never his lover—she'd run as soon as he'd tried to claim her.

But she did know that he'd been a monster.

" _Could_ you withstand him?" she asked, gently.

At that moment, there was a gentle snick some distance behind her—the sound of the door latch opening.

"Freeze!" Paul yelled, his gun suddenly pointing towards the door instead of Li Ann.

Li Ann dove towards Paul.

The lights went out. The room was plunged into total darkness.

"Watch out!" she heard Vic yelling. "There's a bomb, Paul's got a dead man's switch!"

The switch was what Li Ann had been going for, but by the time she got there, Paul had moved.

She heard gunshots, very close.

She ducked low, hoping to avoid stray bullets, and tried to make sense of the sounds she was hearing. She could hear scuffling, grunting, the sound of punches and kicks landing. No more shots—either Paul was disarmed, or he'd decided to stop shooting randomly into the dark.

Suddenly something metallic was being pressed into her hand. "Hold onto this," Mac's voice said next to her ear. "Don't let go."

Then Mac was gone again.

Li Ann used her other hand to feel what she'd just been given. It was the dead man's switch.

She crept towards her most recent memory of a wall, cradling the switch close against her chest.

Mac was here. Mac was fighting Paul, in the dark.

What the hell was he thinking? One kick to the head could kill him.

_He was thinking he needed to rescue us,_ Li Ann reflected ruefully.

That didn't mean she wasn't furious with him for being so reckless.

"Clear," Mac called out suddenly. "I've got him. Vic, you can turn on the lights. Go three steps forward. A little to your left. About ten centimetres higher. There you go."

The lights thunked on all at once. Li Ann blinked against the stabbing brightness.

In the middle of the room, Paul was sprawled on the floor on his belly. Mac was kneeling on his back and pinning his arms.

Mac had night-vision goggles on, which explained a few things.

Vic immediately got his pocket knife out and went to free Dobrinsky first, then Jackie.

Li Ann stayed back by the wall, holding on to the switch.

As soon as he was free, Dobrinsky went up the stairs to the Director's private office. He came back a moment later with a matched pair of handcuffs and shackles, and relieved Mac of his prisoner. "I'll take it from here, sport," he said, and led Paul away.

Li Ann glanced at Paul's face as he left, but she had to look away; his expression was unbearably bleak.

"Wow," Vic said, going over to give Mac a brusque hug with a mandatory back-thump. "Nice going, man."

"Guys?" Li Ann said, tightly. "Still got a little issue here."

"Oh, right." Vic paled.

Jackie came over to Li Ann's side and peered at the device. "Huh," she said, "It's a dud."

"What?" Vic said.

Jackie took the switch from Li Ann and held it up to the light. "Yeah," she said. "It's fake. There's no transmitter. Paul was bluffing." She opened her hand; the switch popped open with a little click.

"Gah!" Vic said.

Li Ann didn't even remember deciding to hit the floor, she was just down there with her arms over her head.

And nothing happened.

"Ha, you should see the three of you," Jackie chortled.

Li Ann lifted her head cautiously.

The guys had hit the floor too—interestingly, it looked as though Vic had thrown himself _over_ Mac, to shield him.

Not that that would've helped much if there really had been a bomb in the ceiling.

"Jackie," Vic said irritably, climbing back to his feet, "The next time you decide to test a hypothesis, let me know first so that I can get out of the fucking room."

"Relax, Vic," Jackie said. "I know bombs. I _like_ bombs." She scowled at Li Ann. "I _don't_ like people telling people to shoot me, though."

"That was a tactic," Li Ann said. "I wasn't really going to let him shoot you."

"I don't know _what_ all you were telling him," Jackie said, still pouting.

"I was just trying to unsettle him," Li Ann said. "Get him to drop his guard."

"It looked like it might have worked," Vic said, sort of encouragingly. "Either that, or you were going to provoke him into shooting you first."

Li Ann shrugged. "I was working with what I had. Mac's way worked better."

"The night vision goggles were a nice touch," Vic agreed, giving Mac an appreciative nod. "It might've helped a bit more if you'd brought a gun, though."

"You didn't leave me one," Mac said, sounding piqued. "Or car keys, for that matter. By the way, sorry, I had to hot-wire your truck."

"You what?" Vic yelped.

Li Ann, meanwhile, went over to Mac and gave him a tight hug. Then she put her hands on his cheeks and made him hold his head still so that she could check his pupils. "You're an _idiot_ , by the way," she said. "Are you okay? Did you get hit?"

"I'm fine," he said. "I promise."

"You'd better be," she said, and she kissed him.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Yourlibrarian for beta reading, and for suggesting the story title!
> 
> This is a teensy tiny fandom, so posting to it can feel a little lonely; if you've read the story and enjoyed it, I would love to hear from you. (But don't feel obliged, it's all okay!)


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